Alexander Pope - Delphi Poets Series

by Alexander Pope

  A man, therefore, happier than Pope in his domestic relations cannot easily have lived. It is true these relations were circumscribed; had they been wider, they could not have been so happy. But Pope was equally fortunate in his social relations. What, indeed, most of all surprises us, is the courteous, flattering, and even brilliant reception which Pope found from his earliest boyhood amongst the most accomplished men of the world. Wits, courtiers, statesmen, grandees the most dignified, and men of fashion the most brilliant, all alike treated him not only with pointed kindness, but with a respect that seemed to acknowledge him as their intellectual superior. Without rank, high birth, fortune, without even a literary name, and in defiance of a deformed person, Pope, whilst yet only sixteen years of age, was caressed, and even honored; and all this with no one recommendation but simply the knowledge of his dedication to letters, and the premature expectations which he raised of future excellence. Sir William Trumbull, a veteran statesman, who had held the highest stations, both diplomatic and ministerial, made him his daily companion. Wycherley, the old roue of the town, a second-rate wit, but not the less jealous on that account, showed the utmost deference to one whom, as a man of fashion, he must have regarded with contempt, and between whom and himself there were nearly “fifty good years of fair and foul weather.” Cromwell, [Endnote: 8] a fox-hunting country gentleman, but uniting with that character the pretensions of a wit, and affecting also the reputation of a rake, cultivated his regard with zeal and conscious inferiority. Nay, which never in any other instance happened to the most fortunate poet, his very inaugural essays in verse were treated, not as prelusive efforts of auspicious promise, but as finished works of art, entitled to take their station amongst the literature of the land; and in the most worthless of all his poems, Walsh, an established authority, and whom Dryden pronounced the ablest critic of the age, found proofs of equality with Virgil.

  The literary correspondence with these gentlemen is interesting, as a model of what once passed for fine letter-writing. Every nerve was strained to outdo each other in carving all thoughts into a fillagree work of rhetoric; and the amoebaean contest was like that between two village cocks from neighboring farms endeavoring to overcrow each other. To us, in this age of purer and more masculine taste, the whole scene takes the ludicrous air of old and young fops dancing a minuet with each other, practising the most elaborate grimaces, sinkings and risings the most awful, bows the most overshadowing, until plain walking, running, or the motions of natural dancing, are thought too insipid for endurance. In this instance the taste had perhaps really been borrowed from France, though often enough we impute to France what is the native growth of all minds placed in similar circumstances. Madame de Sevigne’s Letters were really models of grace. But Balzac, whose letters, however, are not without interest, had in some measure formed himself upon the truly magnificent rhetoric of Pliny and Seneca. Pope and his correspondents, meantime, degraded the dignity of rhetoric, by applying it to trivial commonplaces of compliment; whereas Seneca applied it to the grandest themes which life or contemplation can supply. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, on first coming amongst the wits of the day, naturally adopted their style. She found this sort of euphuism established; and it was not for a very young woman to oppose it. But her masculine understanding and powerful good sense, shaken free, besides, from all local follies by travels and extensive commerce with the world, first threw off these glittering chains of affectation.

  Dean Swift, by the very constitution of his mind, plain, sinewy, nervous, and courting only the strength that allies itself with homeliness, was always indisposed to this mode of correspondence. And, finally, Pope himself, as his earlier friends died off, and his own understanding acquired strength, laid it aside altogether. One reason doubtless was, that he found it too fatiguing; since in this way of letter-writing he was put to as much expense of wit in amusing an individual correspondent, as would for an equal extent have sufficed to delight the whole world. A funambulist may harass his muscles and risk his neck on the tight-rope, but hardly to entertain his own family. Pope, however, had another reason for declining this showy system of fencing; and strange it is that he had not discovered this reason from the very first. As life advanced, it happened unavoidably that real business advanced; the careless condition of youth prompted no topics, or at least prescribed none, but such as were agreeable to the taste, and allowed of an ornamental coloring. But when downright business occurred, exchequer bills to be sold, meetings to be arranged, negotiations confided, difficulties to be explained, here and there by possibility a jest or two might be scattered, a witty allusion thrown in, or a sentiment interwoven; but for the main body of the case, it neither could receive any ornamental treatment, nor if, by any effort of ingenuity, it had, could it look otherwise than silly and unreasonable:

  “Ornari les a ipsa negat, contenta doceri.”

  Pope’s idleness, therefore, on the one hand, concurring with good sense and the necessities of business on the other, drove him to quit his gay rhetoric in letter-writing. But there are passages surviving in his correspondence which indicate, that, after all, had leisure and the coarse perplexities of life permitted it, he still looked with partiality upon his youthful style, and cherished it as a first love. But in this harsh world, as the course of true love, so that of rhetoric, never did run smooth; and thus it happened that, with a lingering farewell, he felt himself forced to bid it adieu. Strange that any man should think his own sincere and confidential overflowings of thought and feeling upon books, men, and public affairs, less valuable in a literary view than the legerdemain of throwing up bubbles into the air for the sake of watching their prismatic hues, like an Indian juggler with his cups and balls. We of this age, who have formed our notions of epistolary excellence from the chastity of Gray’s, the brilliancy of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s during her later life, and the mingled good sense and fine feeling of Cowper’s, value only those letters of Pope which he himself thought of inferior value. And even with regard to these, we may say that there is a great mistake made; the best of those later letters between Pope and Swift, &c., are not in themselves at all superior to the letters of sensible and accomplished women, such as leave every town in the island by every post. Their chief interest is a derivative one; we are pleased with any letter, good or bad, which relates to men of such eminent talent; and sometimes the subjects discussed have a separate interest for themselves. But as to the quality of the discussion, apart from the person discussing and the thing discussed, so trivial is the value of these letters in a large proportion, that we cannot but wonder at the preposterous value which was set upon them by the writers. [Endnote: 9] Pope especially ought not to have his ethereal works loaded by the mass of trivial prose which is usually attached to them.

  This correspondence, meantime, with the wits of the time, though one mode by which, in the absence of reviews, the reputation of an author was spread, did not perhaps serve the interests of Pope so effectually as the poems which in this way he circulated in those classes of English society whose favor he chiefly courted. One of his friends, the truly kind and accomplished Sir William Trumbull, served him in that way, and perhaps in another eventually even more important. The library of Pope’s father was composed exclusively of polemical divinity, a proof, by the way, that he was not a blind convert to the Roman Catholic faith; or, if he was so originally, had reviewed the grounds of it, and adhered to it after strenuous study. In this dearth of books at his own home, and until he was able to influence his father in buying more extensively, Pope had benefited by the loans of his friends; amongst whom it is probable that Sir William, as one of the best scholars of the whole, might assist him most. He certainly offered him the most touching compliment, as it was also the wisest and most paternal counsel, when he besought him, as one goddess-born, to quit the convivial society of deep-drinkers:

  “Heu, fuge nate dea, teque his, ait, eripe malis.”

  With these aids from friends of rank, and his way thus l
aid open to public favor, in the year 1709 Pope first came forward upon the stage of literature. The same year which terminated his legal minority introduced him to the public. Miscellanies in those days were almost periodical repositories of fugitive verse. Tonson happened at this time to be publishing one of some extent, the sixth volume of which offered a sort of ambush to the young aspirant of Windsor Forest, from which he might watch the public feeling. The volume was opened by Mr. Ambrose Philips, in the character of pastoral poet; and in the same character, but stationed at the end of the volume, and thus covered by his bucolic leader, as a soldier to the rear by the file in advance, appeared Pope; so that he might win a little public notice, without too much seeming to challenge it. This half-clandestine emersion upon the stage of authorship, and his furtive position, are both mentioned by Pope as accidents, but as accidents in which he rejoiced, and not improbably accidents which Tonson had arranged with a view to his satisfaction.

  It must appear strange that Pope at twenty-one should choose to come forward for the first time with a work composed at sixteen. A difference of five years at that stage of life is of more effect than of twenty at a later; and his own expanding judgment could hardly fail to inform him, that his Pastorals were by far the worst of his works. In reality, let us not deny, that had Pope never written any thing else, his name would not have been known as a name even of promise, but would probably have been redeemed from oblivion by some satirist or writer of a Dunciad. Were a man to meet with such a nondescript monster as the following, viz.,” Love out of Mount Mlna by Whirlwind”he would suppose himself reading the Racing Calendar. Yet this hybrid creature is one of the many zoological monsters to whom the Pastorals introduce us:

  ”I know thee. love! on foreign mountains born.

  Wolves gave thee suck, and savage tigers fed.

  Thou wert from Aetna’s burning entrails torn.

  Got by fierce whirlwinds, and in thunder born.”

  But the very names “Damon” and “Strephon,” “Phillis” and “Delia,” are rank with childishness. Arcadian life is, at the best, a feeble conception, and rests upon the false principle of crowding together all the luscious sweets of rural life, undignified by the danger which attends pastoral life in our climate, and unrelieved by shades, either moral or physical. And the Arcadia of Pope’s age was the spurious Arcadia of the opera theatre, and, what is worse, of the French opera.

  The hostilities which followed between these rival wooers of the pastoral muse are well known. Pope, irritated at what he conceived the partiality shown to Philips in the Guardian, pursued the review ironically; and, whilst affecting to load his antagonist with praises, draws into pointed relief some of his most flagrant faults. The result, however, we cannot believe. That all the wits, except Addison, were duped by the irony, is quite impossible. Could any man of sense mistake for praise the remark, that Philips had imitated “every line of Strada; “that he had introduced wolves into England, and proved himself the first of gardeners by making his flowers “blow all in the same season.” Or, suppose those passages unnoticed, could the broad sneer escape him, where Pope taxes the other writer (viz., himself) with having deviated” into downright poetry; “or the outrageous ridicule of Philip’s style, as setting up for the ideal type of the pastoral style, the quotation from Gay, beginning,

  ”Rager, go vetch tha kee, or else tha zun

  Will quite bego before ch’ ‘avs half a don!”

  Philips is said to have resented this treatment by threats of personal chastisement to Pope, and even hanging up a rod at Button’s coffee-house. We may be certain that Philips never disgraced himself by such ignoble conduct. If the public indeed were universally duped by the paper, what motive had Philips for resentment? Or, in any case, what plea had he for attacking Pope, who had not come forward as the author of the essay? But, from Pope’s confidential account of the matter, we know that Philips saw him daily, and never offered him “any indecorum;” though, for some cause or other, Pope pursued Philips with virulence through life.

  In the year 1711, Pope published his Essay on Criticism, which some people have very unreasonably fancied his best performance; and in the same year his Rape of the Lock, the most exquisite monument of playful fancy that universal literature offers. It wanted, however, as yet, the principle of its vitality, in wanting the machinery of sylphs and gnomes, with which addition it was first published in 1714.

  In the year 1712, Pope appeared again before the public as the author of the Temple of Fame, and the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. Much speculation has arisen on the question concerning the name of this lady, and the more interesting question concerning the nature of the persecutions and misfortunes which she suffered. Pope appears purposely to decline answering the questions of his friends upon that point; at least the questions have reached us, and the answers have not. Joseph Warton supposed himself to have ascertained four facts about her: that her name was Wainsbury; that she was deformed in person; that she retired into a convent from some circumstances connected with an attachment to a young man of inferior rank; and that she killed herself, not by a sword, as the poet insinuates, but by a halter. As to the latter statement, it may very possibly be true; such a change would be a very slight exercise of the poet’s privileges. As to the rest, there are scarcely grounds enough for an opinion. Pope certainly speaks of her under the name of Mrs. (i. e. Miss) W — , which at least argues a poetical exaggeration in describing her as a being “that once had titles, honor, wealth, and fame;” and he may as much have exaggerated her pretensions to beauty. It is indeed noticeable, that he speaks simply of her decent limbs, which, in any English use of the word, does not imply much enthusiasm of praise. She appears to have been the niece of a Lady A — ; and Mr. Craggs, afterwards secretary of state, wrote to Lady A — on her behalf, and otherwise took an interest in her fate. As to her being a relative of the Duke of Buckingham’s, that rests upon a mere conjectural interpretation applied to a letter of that nobleman’s. But all things about this unhappy lady are as yet enveloped in mystery. And not the least part of the mystery is a letter of Pope’s to a Mr. C — , bearing date 1732, that is, just twenty years after the publication of the poem, in which Pope, in a manly tone, justifies himself for his estrangement, and presses against his unknown correspondent the very blame which he had applied generally to the kinsman of the poor victim in 1712. Now, unless there is some mistake in the date, how are we to explain this gentleman’s long lethargy, and his sudden sensibility to Pope’s anathema, with which the world had resounded for twenty years?

  Pope had now established his reputation with the public as the legitimate successor and heir to the poetical supremacy of Dryden. His Rape of the Lock was unrivalled in ancient or modern literature, and the time had now arrived when, instead of seeking to extend his fame, he might count upon a pretty general support in applying what he had already established to the promotion of his own interest. Accordingly, in the autumn of 1713, he formed a final resolution of undertaking a new translation of the Iliad. It must be observed, that already in 1709, concurrently with his Pastorals, he had published specimens of such a translation; and these had been communicated to his friends some time before. In particular, Sir William Trumbull, on the 9th of April, 1708, urged upon Pope a complete translation of both Iliad and Odyssey. Defective skill in the Greek language, exaggeration of the difficulties, and the timidity of a writer as yet unknown, and not quite twenty years old, restrained Pope for five years and more. What he had practised as a sort of bravura, for a single effort of display, he recoiled from as a daily task to be pursued through much toil, and a considerable section of his life. However, he dallied with the purpose, starting difficulties in the temper of one who wishes to hear them undervalued; until at length Sir Richard Steele determined him to the undertaking, a fact overlooked by the biographers, but which is ascertained by Ayre’s account of that interview between Pope and Addison, probably in 1716, which sealed the rupture between them. In the
autumn of 1713, he made his design known amongst his friends. Accordingly, on the 21st of October, we have Lord Lansdown’s letter, expressing his great pleasure at the communication; on the 26th, we have Addison’s letter encouraging him to the task; and in November of the same year occurs the amusing scene so graphically described by Bishop Kennet, when Dean Swift presided in the conversation, and, amongst other indications of his conscious authority, “instructed a young nobleman, that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope, who had begun a translation of Homer into English verse, for which he must have them all subscribe; for,” says he,” the author shall not begin to print until I have a thousand guineas for him.”