Alexander Pope - Delphi Poets Series

by Alexander Pope

  Chesterfield’s son, who was educated for a diplomatist, is told that the art of pleasing is more necessary in his profession than perhaps in any other. ‘Make your court particularly, and show distinguished attentions to such men and women as are best at Court, highest in the fashion and in the opinion of the public; speak advantageously of them behind their backs, in companies who you have reason to believe will tell them again.’

  The necessity for dissimulation, constantly enjoined by his father was not forgotten by Philip Stanhope. So effectually did he conceal his marriage that the Earl was not aware of it until after his son’s death.

  George Lyttelton (1708-1773).

  George Lyttelton, afterwards Lord Lyttelton, has a place among the poets in the collections of Anderson and Chalmers. Some of his best verses were written when a school-boy at Eton, and are worthy of a clever school-boy. The Monody on his wife’s death has the merit of sincere feeling, expressed in one or two passages poetically. In 1747 he published his Dissertation on the Conversion of St. Paul, ‘a treatise,’ says Dr. Johnson, ‘to which infidelity has never been able to fabricate a specious answer.’ He made himself conspicuous in parliament as an opponent of Walpole, and after the fall of that minister was appointed one of the Lords of the Treasury. In 1760 Lyttelton published his Dialogues of the Dead, a volume for which he owes much to Fénelon. This was followed a few years later by a History of Henry II. in three volumes, upon which great labour was expended. He is said to have had the whole history printed twice over, and many sheets four or five times, an amusement which cost him £1,000. The work is praised by Mr. J. R. Green as ‘a full and sober account of the time.’

  Lyttelton died at Hagley Park in his sixty-fourth year. Close to Hagley, Shenstone had his little estate of the Leasowes, and the poet is said to have cherished the absurd fancy that Lord Lyttelton was envious of its beauty. He is now chiefly remembered as the patron of Thomson, whom he called ‘one of the best and most beloved’ of his friends.

  Joseph Spence (1698-1768).

  Joseph Spence, a warm friend and admirer of Pope in the poet’s later life, had the happy peculiarity of keeping free from the party animosities of the time. His course throughout was that of a gentleman, and to him we owe the little volume of Anecdotes which every student of Pope has learnt to value. Spence had much of Boswell’s curiosity and hero-worship, but there is neither insight into character in his pages, nor any trace of the dramatic skill which makes Boswell’s narrative so delightful. At the same time there is every indication that he strove to give the sayings of the poet, as far as possible, in his own words. Johnson and Warton saw the Anecdotes in manuscript, but strange to say, the collection was not published until 1820, when two separate editions appeared simultaneously. The publication by Spence in 1727 of An Essay on Pope’s Translation of Homer’s Odyssey led to an acquaintance which soon became intimate between the poet and his critic. Apart from literature, they had more than one point of interest in common. Like Pope, Spence was devoted to his mother, and like Pope he had a passion for landscape gardening. His mild virtues and engaging disposition are said to be portrayed in the Tales of the Genii, under the character of Fincal the Dervise of the Groves. In 1747 he published his Polymetis, an Enquiry into the agreement between the Works of the Roman Poets and the Remains of Ancient Artists. Under the nom de plume of Sir Harry Beaumont, Spence produced a volume of Moralities or Essays, Letters, Fables and Translations (1753), and in the following year an account of the blind poet Blacklock. For a learned tailor, Thomas Hill by name, he also performed a similarly kind office, comparing him in A Parallel in the Manner of Plutarch with the famous linguist Magliabecchi. Spence was made Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1728, and held the post for ten years. His end was a sad one. He was accidentally drowned in a canal in the garden which he had loved so well.

  CHAPTER VII. FRANCIS ATTERBURY — LORD SHAFTESBURY — BERNARD DE MANDEVILLE — LORD BOLINGBROKE — BISHOP BERKELEY — WILLIAM LAW — BISHOP BUTLER — BISHOP WARBURTON.

  Francis Atterbury (1662-1732).

  During the first half of the eighteenth century the position held by Bishop Atterbury was one of high eminence. Addison ranked him with the most illustrious geniuses of his age; Pope said he was one of the greatest men in polite learning the nation ever possessed; Doddridge called him the glory of English orators; and Johnson said that for style his sermons are among the best.

  Unfortunately Atterbury’s literary gifts, like his oratory, lack the merit of permanence, and his sermons, more conspicuous for eloquence than for weightiness of matter, although extremely popular at the time, have long ceased to be read. His prominence among the Queen Anne wits, — and he was admired by them all, — is a sufficient reason for saying a few words about him in these pages.

  He was born in 1662, and, like Prior, educated at Westminster under the famous Dr. Busby. Thence he went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained a good reputation. He undertook the tutorship of the Hon. C. Boyle, a young man of more spirit than judgment, who had the audacity to enter the lists with Bentley in a matter of scholarship. For this rash deed Atterbury must be held responsible. Sir William Temple had published a foolish but eloquently written essay in defence of the ancient writers in comparison with the modern. In this essay he praises warmly the Letters of Phalaris. Of these letters Boyle, with the help of Atterbury and other members of Christ Church, published a new edition to satisfy the demand caused by Temple’s essay. Bentley, roused to reply by a remark of Boyle in his preface, proved that the Letters were not only spurious but contemptible. Under his pupil’s name Atterbury replied to Bentley’s Dissertations, and to the discussion, as the reader will remember, Swift added wit if not argument.

  For the moment Boyle’s, or rather Atterbury’s success, was great, for wit and rhetoric are powerful persuasives. The authors, too, had the Christ Church men to back them, the arch-critic having treated them with contempt. Atterbury’s share in the work, as he tells Boyle, “consisted in writing more than half the book, in reviewing a great part of the rest, and in transcribing the whole.” His Examination of Dr. Bentley’s Dissertations (1698) is a brilliant piece of work, and ‘deserves the praise,’ says Macaulay, ‘whatever that praise may be worth, of being the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he was profoundly ignorant.’ Having taken holy orders, Atterbury became a court preacher, and ample clerical honours fell to his share. In 1700 he published a book entitled, The Rights, Powers, and Privileges of an English Convocation Stated and Vindicated, which was warmly applauded by High Churchmen. In 1701 he was appointed Archdeacon of Totness, and afterwards Prebend of Exeter. He became the favourite chaplain of Queen Anne, and when Prince George died proved the power of his eloquence by representing ‘his unassuming virtues in such high relief that his widow could not help feeling her irreparable loss.’

  Atterbury was made successively Dean of Carlisle and of Christ Church, and in 1713 succeeded Sprat as Dean of Westminster and Bishop of Rochester. Before making Swift’s acquaintance he recommended his friend Trelawney, Bishop of Exeter, to read the Tale of a Tub, a book which is to be valued, ‘in spite of its profaneness,’ as ‘an original in its kind, full of wit, humour, good sense, and learning.’ Atterbury’s taste for literature was not always so discriminative. He advised Pope, as has been already stated, to ‘polish’ Samson Agonistes, declared that all verses should have instruction at the bottom of them, and told the poet, as though he had discovered a merit, that his poetry was ‘all over morality from the beginning to the end of it.’ He ventured occasionally into the verse-making field himself, and wrote a song to Silvia, in which, after admitting that he had loved before as men worship strange deities, he adds:

  ‘My heart, ‘tis true, has often ranged, Like bees on gaudy flowers, And many a thousand loves has changed, Till it was fixed on yours.

  ‘But, Silvia, when I saw those eyes, ‘Twas soon determined there; Stars might as well forsake the skies, And vanish into
air.

  ‘When I from this great rule do err, New beauties to adore, May I again turn wanderer, And never settle more.’

  The close friendship between Atterbury and Pope did honour to both men, and when Pope went to London he would ‘lie at the deanery.’ There, unknown to his friend, the bishop carried on his Jacobite intrigues, and there may still be seen, in a residence made famous by more than one great name, a secret room in which Atterbury concealed his treasonable correspondence. The poet did not believe that his friend was guilty, but it has been well known since the publication of the Stuart papers, more than forty years ago, that the splendid defence made by Atterbury at his trial in the House of Lords was based upon a falsehood. For years the bishop appears to have corresponded, under feigned names and by the help of ciphers, with ‘the king over the water;’ but the plot which led to his imprisonment and ultimate exile was not discovered until 1722, when he was arrested for high treason. At his trial he called God to witness his innocence; and when Pope took leave of him in the Tower he told the poet he would allow him to call his sentence a just one if he should ever find that he had dealings with the Pretender in his exile. Pope gave evidence at his trial, and, as he told Spence, lost his self-possession and made two or three blunders.

  Atterbury was exiled in June, 1723. On reaching Calais he heard that Bolingbroke had just arrived there on his way to England, having had a royal pardon. ‘Then I am exchanged,’ he said.

  The pathetic story of his banishment, and of his devoted daughter’s illness and voyage to the south of France, where after a union of a few hours, she died in her father’s arms, is full of the most touching details, and may be read in Atterbury’s correspondence. ‘She is gone,’ the bishop wrote, ‘and I must follow her. When I do, may my latter end be like hers! It was my business to have taught her to die; instead of it, she has taught me.’ Like Fielding’s account of his Voyage to Lisbon, the letters give a picture of the time, and of travelling discomforts and difficulties of which we, in these more fortunate days, know nothing. The bishop, who did not long survive his daughter, died in 1732, but before the end came he defended himself admirably from the accusation of Oldmixon, a libeller who stands in the pillory of the Dunciad, that he had helped to garble Clarendon’s History. The body was carried to England and privately buried by the side of his daughter in Westminster Abbey. The eloquence of Atterbury’s sermons — there are four volumes of them in print — has not secured to them a lasting place in literature, but they are distinguished by purity of style, and have enough of unction to make them highly effective as pulpit discourses. In book form, too, they were for a long time popular, and reached an eighth edition about thirty years after the bishop’s death. The eloquent sermon on the death of Lady Cutts endows the lady with such an array of virtues, that one is inclined to wonder how so many rare qualities could have been exhibited in so brief a life:

  ‘She excelled in all the characters that belonged to her, and was in a great measure equal to all the obligations that she lay under. She was devout without superstition; strict, without ill humour; good-natured, without weakness; cheerful, without levity; regular, without affectation. She was to her husband the best of wives, the most agreeable of companions, and most faithful of friends; to her servants the best of mistresses; to her relations extremely respectful; to her inferiors very obliging; and by all that knew her, either nearly or at a distance, she was reckoned and confessed to be one of the best of women. And yet all this goodness and all this excellence was bounded within the compass of eighteen years and as many days; for no longer was she allowed to live among us. She was snatched out of the world as soon almost as she had made her appearance in it, like a jewel of high price just shown a little, and then put up again, and we were deprived of her by that time we had learnt to value her. But circles may be complete though small; the perfection of life doth not consist in the length of it.’

  As a friend of literature and of men of letters, Atterbury claims the student’s recognition, and the five volumes of his correspondence deserve to be consulted.

  Anthony, third Lord Shaftesbury (1671-1713).

  ‘I will tell you,’ writes the poet Gray, ‘how Lord Shaftesbury came to be a philosopher in vogue: first, he was a lord; secondly, he was as vain as any of his readers; thirdly, men are very prone to believe what they do not understand; fourthly, they will believe anything at all provided they are under no obligation to believe it; fifthly, they love to take a new road, even when that road leads nowhere; sixthly, he was reckoned a fine writer, and seemed always to mean more than he said. Would you have any more reasons? An interval of above forty years has pretty well destroyed the charm.’

  One hundred and thirty-five years have gone by since Gray wrote his estimate of Lord Shaftesbury, whose Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) passed through several editions in the last century. The first volume consists of: A Letter concerning Enthusiasm, An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour and Advice to an Author; Vol. ii. contains An Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit (1699), and The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody (1709), and Vol. iii. contains Miscellaneous Reflections and the Judgments of Hercules.

  Shaftesbury was a Deist, and while professing to honour the Christian faith, which he terms ‘our holy religion,’ exercises his wit and casuistry and command of English to undermine it. Pope, who shows in the Essay on Man that he had read the Characteristics, said that to his knowledge ‘the work had done more harm to revealed religion in England than all the works of infidelity,’ a judgment which may seem extravagant, for Shaftesbury is too vague and rhetorical greatly to influence thoughtful readers, and too much of a ‘virtuoso,’ to use his own words, for readers of another class; yet the fact that the work passed, as we have said, through several editions, shows that the author had a considerable public to whom he could appeal. Moreover, it is clear that what Mr. Balfour calls ‘the shallow optimism’ of his creed was not deemed so inconsiderable then as it now appears, or Berkeley would not have deemed it necessary to controvert his arguments in the third Dialogue of his Alciphron. Like Berkeley, Shaftesbury occasionally makes use of the dialogue very effectively, but he has not the bishop’s incisiveness. His style, though often faulty, and giving one the impression that the author is affected, and wishes to say fine things, is at its best fresh and lucid. The reader will observe that whatever be the topic Shaftesbury professes to discuss, his one aim is to assert his principles as a free-thinking and free-speaking philosopher. His inferences, his illustrations, his criticisms, and exaltation of the ‘moral sense,’ are all so many underhanded blows at the faith which he never openly opposes.

  Thus his essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour is chiefly written in defence of raillery in the discussion of serious subjects, when managed ‘with good breeding,’ and for ‘a liberty in decent language to question everything’ amongst gentlemen and friends. He regards ridicule as the antidote to enthusiasm, believes in the harmony and perfection of nature, and considers that evil only exists in our ignorance. Mr. Leslie Stephen, whose impartiality in estimating an author like Shaftesbury will not be questioned, calls him a wearisome and perplexed writer, whose rhetoric is flimsy, but who has ‘a true vigour and originality which redeems him from contempt.’

  Judged by his influence on the age Shaftesbury’s place in the history of literature and of philosophy is an important one. Seed springs up quickly when the soil is prepared for it, and Shaftesbury by his belief in the perfectibility of human nature through the aid of culture, appealed, as Mandeville also did from a lower and opposite platform, to the views current in polite society. According to Shaftesbury men have a natural instinct for virtue, and the sense of what is beautiful enables the virtuoso to reject what is evil and to cleave to what is good. Let a man once see that to be wicked is to be miserable, and virtue will be dear for its own sake apart from the fear of punishment or the hope of reward. He found salvation for the world in a cultivated taste, but had no gospel for the men who
se tastes were not cultivated.

  Voltaire sneered at the optimism of the Essay on Man and of the Characteristics. ‘Shaftesbury,’ he says, ‘who made the fable fashionable, was a very unhappy man. I have seen Bolingbroke a prey to vexation and rage, and Pope, whom he induced to put this sorry jest into verse, was as much to be pitied as any man I have ever known; mis-shapen in body, dissatisfied in mind, always ill, always a burden to himself, and harassed by a hundred enemies to his very last moment.’

  Bernard de Mandeville (1670?-1733).

  Bernard de Mandeville gained much notoriety by his Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits (1723). The book opens with a poem in doggrel verse called The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves turned honest, the purport of which is to show that as the bees became virtuous, they ceased to be successful. He closes with the moral that