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Project Gutenberg's The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, by Alexander Pope
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Title: The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems
Author: Alexander Pope
Posting Date: December 8, 2011 [EBook #9800]
Release Date: January, 2006
First Posted: October 18, 2003
Language: English
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THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
AND OTHER POEMS
BY
ALEXANDER POPE
EDITED
WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES
BY
THOMAS MARC PARROTT, PH. D.
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
THIS EDITION PUBLISHED 1906
PREFACE
It has been the aim of the editor in preparing this little book to get
together sufficient material to afford a student in one of our high
schools or colleges adequate and typical specimens of the vigorous and
versatile genius of Alexander Pope. With this purpose he has included in
addition to 'The Rape of the Lock', the 'Essay on Criticism' as
furnishing the standard by which Pope himself expected his work to be
judged, the 'First Epistle' of the 'Essay on Man' as a characteristic
example of his didactic poetry, and the 'Epistle to Arbuthnot', both for
its exhibition of Pope's genius as a satirist and for the picture it
gives of the poet himself. To these are added the famous close of the
'Dunciad', the 'Ode to Solitude', a specimen of Pope's infrequent lyric
note, and the 'Epitaph on Gay'.
The first edition of 'The Rape of the Lock' has been given as an
appendix in order that the student may have the opportunity of comparing
the two forms of this poem, and of realizing the admirable art with
which Pope blended old and new in the version that is now the only one
known to the average reader. The text throughout is that of the Globe
Edition prepared by Professor A. W. Ward.
The editor can lay no claim to originality in the notes with which he
has attempted to explain and illustrate these poems. He is indebted at
every step to the labors of earlier editors, particularly to Elwin,
Courthope, Pattison, and Hales. If he has added anything of his own, it
has been in the way of defining certain words whose meaning or
connotation has changed since the time of Pope, and in paraphrasing
certain passages to bring out a meaning which has been partially
obscured by the poet's effort after brevity and concision.
In the general introduction the editor has aimed not so much to recite
the facts of Pope's life as to draw the portrait of a man whom he
believes to have been too often misunderstood and misrepresented. The
special introductions to the various poems are intended to acquaint the
student with the circumstances under which they were composed, to trace
their literary genesis and relationships, and, whenever necessary, to
give an outline of the train of thought which they embody.
In conclusion the editor would express the hope that his labors in the
preparation of this book may help, if only in some slight degree, to
stimulate the study of the work of a poet who, with all his limitations,
remains one of the abiding glories of English literature, and may
contribute not less to a proper appreciation of a man who with all his
faults was, on the evidence of those who knew him best, not only a great
poet, but a very human and lovable personality.
T. M. P.
'Princeton University', 'June' 4, 1906.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM
AN ESSAY ON MAN, EPISTLE I
AN EPISTLE TO DR ARBUTHNOT
ODE ON SOLITUDE
THE DESCENT OF DULLNESS [FROM THE 'Dunciad', BOOK IV]
EPITAPH ON GAY
NOTES
THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM
AN ESSAY ON MAN (EPISTLE I)
AN EPISTLE TO DR ARBUTHNOT
SELECTIONS
APPENDIX
THE FIRST EDITION OF THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
* * * * *
INTRODUCTION
Perhaps no other great poet in English Literature has been so
differently judged at different times as Alexander Pope. Accepted almost
on his first appearance as one of the leading poets of the day, he
rapidly became recognized as the foremost man of letters of his age. He
held this position throughout his life, and for over half a century
after his death his works were considered not only as masterpieces, but
as the finest models of poetry. With the change of poetic temper that
occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth century Pope's fame was
overshadowed. The romantic poets and critics even raised the question
whether Pope was a poet at all. And as his poetical fame diminished, the
harsh judgments of his personal character increased. It is almost
incredible with what exulting bitterness critics and editors of Pope
have tracked out and exposed his petty intrigues, exaggerated his
delinquencies, misrepresented his actions, attempted in short to blast
his character as a man.
Both as a man and as a poet Pope is sadly in need of a defender to-day.
And a defense is by no means impossible. The depreciation of Pope's
poetry springs, in the main, from an attempt to measure it by other
standards than those which he and his age recognized. The attacks upon
his character are due, in large measure, to a misunderstanding of the
spirit of the times in which he lived and to a forgetfulness of the
special circumstances of his own life. Tried in a fair court by
impartial judges Pope as a poet would be awarded a place, if not among
the noblest singers, at least high among poets of the second order. And
the flaws of character which even his warmest apologist must admit would
on the one hand be explained, if not excused, by circumstances, and on
the other more than counterbalanced by the existence of noble qualities
to which his assailants seem to have been quite blind.
Alexander Pope was born in London on May 21, 1688. His father was a
Roman Catholic linen draper, who had married a second time. Pope was the
only child of this marriage, and seems to have been a delicate,
sweet-tempered, precocious, and, perhaps, a rather spoiled child.
Pope's religion and his chronic ill-health are two facts of the highest
importance to be taken into consideration in any study of his life or
judgment of his character. The high hopes of the Catholics for a
restoration of their religion had been totally destroyed by the
Revolution of 1688. During all Pope's lifetime they were a sect at once
feared, hated, and oppressed by the severest laws. They were excluded
from the schools and universities, they were burdened with double taxes,
and forbidden to acquire real estate. All public careers were closed to
them, and their property and even their persons were in times of
excitement at the mercy of informers. In the last year of Pope's life a
proclamation was issued forbidding Catholics to come within ten miles of
London, and Pope himself, in spite of his influential friends, thought
it wise to comply with this edict. A fierce outburst of persecution
often evokes in the persecuted some of the noblest qualities of human
nature; but a long-continued and crushing tyranny that extends to all
the details of daily life is only too likely to have the most
unfortunate results on those who are subjected to it. And as a matter of
fact we find that the well-to-do Catholics of Pope's day lived in an
atmosphere of disaffection, political intrigue, and evasion of the law,
most unfavorable for the development of that frank, courageous, and
patriotic spirit for the lack of which Pope himself has so often been
made the object of reproach.
In a well-known passage of the 'Epistle to Arbuthnot', Pope has spoken
of his life as one long disease. He was in fact a humpbacked dwarf, not
over four feet six inches in height, with long, spider-like legs and
arms. He was subject to violent headaches, and his face was lined and
contracted with the marks of suffering. In youth he so completely ruined
his health by perpetual studies that his life was despaired of, and only
the most careful treatment saved him from an early death. Toward the
close of his life he became so weak that he could neither dress nor
undress without assistance. He had to be laced up in stiff stays in
order to sit erect, and wore a fur doublet and three pairs of stockings
to protect himself against the cold. With these physical defects he had
the extreme sensitiveness of mind that usually accompanies chronic ill
health, and this sensitiveness was outraged incessantly by the brutal
customs of the age. Pope's enemies made as free with his person as with
his poetry, and there is little doubt that he felt the former attacks
the more bitterly of the two. Dennis, his first critic, called him "a
short squab gentleman, the very bow of the God of love; his outward form
is downright monkey. " A rival poet whom he had offended hung up a rod in
a coffee house where men of letters resorted, and threatened to whip
Pope like a naughty child if he showed his face there. It is said,
though perhaps not on the best authority, that when Pope once forgot
himself so far as to make love to Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the lady's
answer was "a fit of immoderate laughter. " In an appendix to the
'Dunciad' Pope collected some of the epithets with which his enemies had
pelted him, "an ape," "an ass," "a frog," "a coward," "a fool," "a
little abject thing. " He affected, indeed, to despise his assailants,
but there is only too good evidence that their poisoned arrows rankled
in his heart. Richardson, the painter, found him one day reading the
latest abusive pamphlet. "These things are my diversion," said the poet,
striving to put the best face on it; but as he read, his friends saw his
features "writhen with anguish," and prayed to be delivered from all
such "diversions" as these. Pope's enemies and their savage abuse are
mostly forgotten to-day. Pope's furious retorts have been secured to
immortality by his genius. It would have been nobler, no doubt, to have
answered by silence only; but before one condemns Pope it is only fair
to realize the causes of his bitterness.
Pope's education was short and irregular. He was taught the rudiments of
Latin and Greek by his family priest, attended for a brief period a
school in the country and another in London, and at the early age of
twelve left school altogether, and settling down at his father's house
in the country began to read to his heart's delight. He roamed through
the classic poets, translating passages that pleased him, went up for a
time to London to get lessons in French and Italian, and above all read
with eagerness and attention the works of older English poets,--Spenser,
Waller, and Dryden. He had already, it would seem, determined to become
a poet, and his father, delighted with the clever boy's talent, used to
set him topics, force him to correct his verses over and over, and
finally, when satisfied, dismiss him with the praise, "These are good
rhymes. " He wrote a comedy, a tragedy, an epic poem, all of which he
afterward destroyed and, as he laughingly confessed in later years, he
thought himself "the greatest genius that ever was. "
Pope was not alone, however, in holding a high opinion of his talents.
While still a boy in his teens he was taken up and patronized by a
number of gentlemen, Trumbull, Walsh, and Cromwell, all dabblers in
poetry and criticism. He was introduced to the dramatist Wycherly,
nearly fifty years his senior, and helped to polish some of the old
man's verses. His own works were passed about in manuscript from hand to
hand till one of them came to the eyes of Dryden's old publisher,
Tonson. Tonson wrote Pope a respectful letter asking for the honor of
being allowed to publish them. One may fancy the delight with which the
sixteen-year-old boy received this offer. It is a proof of Pope's
patience as well as his precocity that he delayed three years before
accepting it. It was not till 1709 that his first published verses, the
'Pastorals', a fragment translated from Homer, and a modernized version
of one of the 'Canterbury Tales', appeared in Tonson's 'Miscellany'.
With the publication of the 'Pastorals', Pope embarked upon his life as
a man of letters. They seem to have brought him a certain recognition,
but hardly fame. That he obtained by his next poem, the 'Essay on
Criticism', which appeared in 1711. It was applauded in the 'Spectator',
and Pope seems about this time to have made the acquaintance of Addison
and the little senate which met in Button's coffee house. His poem the
'Messiah' appeared in the 'Spectator' in May 1712; the first draft of
'The Rape of the Lock' in a poetical miscellany in the same year, and
Addison's request, in 1713, that he compose a prologue for the tragedy
of 'Cato' set the final stamp upon his rank as a poet.
Pope's friendly relations with Addison and his circle were not, however,
long continued. In the year 1713 he gradually drew away from them and
came under the influence of Swift, then at the height of his power in
political and social life. Swift introduced him to the brilliant Tories,
politicians and lovers of letters, Harley, Bolingbroke, and Atterbury,
who were then at the head of affairs. Pope's new friends seem to have
treated him with a deference which he had never experienced before, and
which bound him to them in unbroken affection. Harley used to regret
that Pope's religion rendered him legally incapable of holding a
sinecure office in the government, such as was frequently bestowed in
those days upon men of letters, and Swift jestingly offered the young
poet twenty guineas to become a Protestant. But now, as later, Pope was
firmly resolved not to abandon the faith of his parents for the sake of
worldly advantage. And in order to secure the independence he valued so
highly he resolved to embark upon the great work of his life, the
translation of Homer.
"What led me into that," he told a friend long after, "was purely the
want of money. I had then none; not even to buy books. " It seems that
about this time, 1713, Pope's father had experienced some heavy
financial losses, and the poet, whose receipts in money had so far been
by no means in proportion to the reputation his works had brought him,
now resolved to use that reputation as a means of securing from the
public a sum which would at least keep him for life from poverty or the
necessity of begging for patronage. It is worth noting that Pope was the
first Englishman of letters who threw himself thus boldly upon the
public and earned his living by his pen.
The arrangements for the publication and sale of Pope's translation of
Homer were made with care and pushed on with enthusiasm. He issued in
1713 his proposals for an edition to be published by subscription, and
his friends at once became enthusiastic canvassers. We have a
characteristic picture of Swift at this time, bustling about a crowded
ante-chamber, and informing the company that the best poet in England
was Mr. Pope (a Papist) who had begun a translation of Homer for which
they must all subscribe, "for," says he, "the author shall not begin to
print till I have a thousand guineas for him. " The work was to be in six
volumes, each costing a guinea. Pope obtained 575 subscribers, many of
whom took more than one set. Lintot, the publisher, gave Pope ? 1200 for
the work and agreed to supply the subscription copies free of charge. As
a result Pope made something between ? 5000 and ? 6000, a sum absolutely
unprecedented in the history of English literature, and amply sufficient
to make him independent for life.
But the sum was honestly earned by hard and wearisome work. Pope was no
Greek scholar; it is said, indeed, that he was just able to make out the
sense of the original with a translation. And in addition to the fifteen
thousand lines of the 'Iliad', he had engaged to furnish an introduction
and notes. At first the magnitude of the undertaking frightened him.
"What terrible moments," he said to Spence, "does one feel after one has
engaged for a large work. In the beginning of my translating the
'Iliad', I wished anybody would hang me a hundred times. It sat so
heavily on my mind at first that I often used to dream of it and do
sometimes still. " In spite of his discouragement, however, and of the
ill health which so constantly beset him, Pope fell gallantly upon his
task, and as time went on came almost to enjoy it. He used to translate
thirty or forty verses in the morning before rising and, in his own
characteristic phrase, "piddled over them for the rest of the day. " He
used every assistance possible, drew freely upon the scholarship of
friends, corrected and recorrected with a view to obtaining clearness
and point, and finally succeeded in producing a version which not only
satisfied his own critical judgment, but was at once accepted by the
English-speaking world as the standard translation of Homer.
The first volume came out in June, 1715, and to Pope's dismay and wrath
a rival translation appeared almost simultaneously. Tickell, one of
Addison's "little senate," had also begun a translation of the 'Iliad',
and although he announced in the preface that he intended to withdraw in
favor of Pope and take up a translation of the 'Odyssey', the poet's
suspicions were at once aroused. And they were quickly fanned into a
flame by the gossip of the town which reported that Addison, the
recognized authority in literary criticism, pronounced Tickell's version
"the best that ever was in any language. " Rumor went so far, in fact, as
to hint pretty broadly that Addison himself was the author, in part, at
least, of Tickell's book; and Pope, who had been encouraged by Addison
to begin his long task, felt at once that he had been betrayed. His
resentment was all the more bitter since he fancied that Addison, now at
the height of his power and prosperity in the world of letters and of
politics, had attempted to ruin an enterprise on which the younger man
had set all his hopes of success and independence, for no better reason
than literary jealousy and political estrangement. We know now that Pope
was mistaken, but there was beyond question some reason at the time for
his thinking as he did, and it is to the bitterness which this incident
caused in his mind that we owe the famous satiric portrait of Addison as
Atticus.
The last volume of the 'Iliad' appeared in the spring of 1720, and in it
Pope gave a renewed proof of his independence by dedicating the whole
work, not to some lord who would have rewarded him with a handsome
present, but to his old acquaintance, Congreve, the last survivor of the
brilliant comic dramatists of Dryden's day. And now resting for a time
from his long labors, Pope turned to the adornment and cultivation of
the little house and garden that he had leased at Twickenham.
Pope's father had died in 1717, and the poet, rejecting politely but
firmly the suggestion of his friend, Atterbury, that he might now turn
Protestant, devoted himself with double tenderness to the care of his
aged and infirm mother. He brought her with him to Twickenham, where she
lived till 1733, dying in that year at the great age of ninety-one. It
may have been partly on her account that Pope pitched upon Twickenham as
his abiding place. Beautifully situated on the banks of the Thames, it
was at once a quiet country place and yet of easy access to London, to
Hampton Court, or to Kew. The five acres of land that lay about the
house furnished Pope with inexhaustible entertainment for the rest of
his life. He "twisted and twirled and harmonized" his bit of ground
"till it appeared two or three sweet little lawns opening and opening
beyond one another, the whole surrounded by impenetrable woods. "
Following the taste of his times in landscape gardening, he adorned his
lawns with artificial mounds, a shell temple, an obelisk, and a
colonnade. But the crowning glory was the grotto, a tunnel decorated
fantastically with shells and bits of looking-glass, which Pope dug
under a road that ran through his grounds. Here Pope received in state,
and his house and garden was for years the center of the most brilliant
society in England. Here Swift came on his rare visits from Ireland, and
Bolingbroke on his return from exile. Arbuthnot, Pope's beloved
physician, was a frequent visitor, and Peterborough, one of the most
distinguished of English soldiers, condescended to help lay out the
garden. Congreve came too, at times, and Gay, the laziest and most
good-natured of poets. Nor was the society of women lacking at these
gatherings. Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the wittiest woman in England,
was often there, until her bitter quarrel with the poet; the grim old
Duchess of Marlborough appeared once or twice in Pope's last years; and
the Princess of Wales came with her husband to inspire the leaders of
the opposition to the hated Walpole and the miserly king. And from first
to last, the good angel of the place was the blue-eyed, sweet-tempered
Patty Blount, Pope's best and dearest friend.
Not long after the completion of the 'Iliad', Pope undertook to edit
Shakespeare, and completed the work in 1724. The edition is, of course,
quite superseded now, but it has its place in the history of
Shakespearean studies as the first that made an effort, though irregular
and incomplete, to restore the true text by collation and conjecture. It
has its place, too, in the story of Pope's life, since the bitter
criticism which it received, all the more unpleasant to the poet since
it was in the main true, was one of the principal causes of his writing
the 'Dunciad'. Between the publication of his edition of Shakespeare,
however, and the appearance of the 'Dunciad', Pope resolved to complete
his translation of Homer, and with the assistance of a pair of friends,
got out a version of the Odyssey in 1725. Like the 'Iliad', this was
published by subscription, and as in the former case the greatest men in
England were eager to show their appreciation of the poet by filling up
his lists. Sir Robert Walpole, the great Whig statesman, took ten
copies, and Harley, the fallen Tory leader, put himself, his wife, and
his daughter down for sixteen. Pope made, it is said, about ? 3700 by
this work.
In 1726, Swift visited Pope and encouraged him to complete a satire
which he seems already to have begun on the dull critics and hack
writers of the day. For one cause or another its publication was
deferred until 1728, when it appeared under the title of the 'Dunciad'.
Here Pope declared open war upon his enemies. All those who had attacked
his works, abused his character, or scoffed at his personal deformities,
were caricatured as ridiculous and sometimes disgusting figures in a
mock epic poem celebrating the accession of a new monarch to the throne
of Dullness. The 'Dunciad' is little read to-day except by professed
students of English letters, but it made, naturally enough, a great stir
at the time and vastly provoked the wrath of all the dunces whose names
it dragged to light. Pope has often been blamed for stooping to such
ignoble combat, and in particular for the coarseness of his abuse, and
for his bitter jests upon the poverty of his opponents. But it must be
remembered that no living writer had been so scandalously abused as
Pope, and no writer that ever lived was by nature so quick to feel and
to resent insult. The undoubted coarseness of the work is in part due to
the gross license of the times in speech and writing, and more
particularly to the influence of Swift, at this time predominant over
Pope. And in regard to Pope's trick of taunting his enemies with
poverty, it must frankly be confessed that he seized upon this charge as
a ready and telling weapon. Pope was at heart one of the most charitable
of men. In the days of his prosperity he is said to have given away one
eighth of his income. And he was always quick to succor merit in
distress; he pensioned the poet Savage and he tried to secure patronage
for Johnson. But for the wretched hack writers of the common press who
had barked against him he had no mercy, and he struck them with the
first rod that lay ready to his hands.
During his work on the 'Dunciad', Pope came into intimate relations with
Bolingbroke, who in 1725 had returned from his long exile in France and
had settled at Dawley within easy reach of Pope's villa at Twickenham.
Bolingbroke was beyond doubt one of the most brilliant and stimulating
minds of his age. Without depth of intellect or solidity of character,
he was at once a philosopher, a statesman, a scholar, and a fascinating
talker. Pope, who had already made his acquaintance, was delighted to
renew and improve their intimacy, and soon came wholly under the
influence of his splendid friend. It is hardly too much to say that all
the rest of Pope's work is directly traceable to Bolingbroke. The 'Essay
on Man' was built up on the precepts of Bolingbroke's philosophy; the
'Imitations of Horace' were undertaken at Bolingbroke's suggestion; and
the whole tone of Pope's political and social satire during the years
from 1731 to 1738 reflects the spirit of that opposition to the
administration of Walpole and to the growing influence of the commercial
class, which was at once inspired and directed by Bolingbroke. And yet
it is exactly in the work of this period that we find the best and with
perhaps one exception, the 'Essay on Man', the most original, work of
Pope. He has obtained an absolute command over his instrument of
expression. In his hands the heroic couplet sings, and laughs, and
chats, and thunders. He has turned from the ignoble warfare with the
dunces to satirize courtly frivolity and wickedness in high places. And
most important of all to the student of Pope, it is in these last works
that his personality is most clearly revealed. It has been well said
that the best introduction to the study of Pope, the man, is to get the
'Epistle to Arbuthnot' by heart.
Pope gradually persuaded himself that all the works of these years, the
'Essay on Man', the 'Satires, Epistles', and 'Moral Essays', were but
parts of one stupendous whole. He told Spence in the last years of his
life: "I had once thought of completing my ethic work in four
books. --The first, you know, is on the Nature of Man [the 'Essay on
Man']; the second would have been on knowledge and its limits--here
would have come in an Essay on Education, part of which I have inserted
in the 'Dunciad' ['i. e. ' in the Fourth Book, published in 1742]. The
third was to have treated of Government, both ecclesiastical and
civil--and this was what chiefly stopped my going on. I could not have
said what 'I would' have said without provoking every church on the face
of the earth; and I did not care for living always in boiling
water. --This part would have come into my 'Brutus' [an epic poem which
Pope never completed], which is planned already. The fourth would have
been on Morality; in eight or nine of the most concerning branches of
it. "
It is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that Pope with his
irregular methods of work and illogical habit of thought had planned so
vast and elaborate a system before he began its execution. It is far
more likely that he followed his old method of composing on the
inspiration of the moment, and produced the works in question with
little thought of their relation or interdependence. But in the last
years of his life, when he had made the acquaintance of Warburton, and
was engaged in reviewing and perfecting the works of this period, he
noticed their general similarity in form and spirit, and, possibly under
Warburton's influence, conceived the notion of combining and
supplementing them to form that "Greater Essay on Man" of which he spoke
to Spence, and of which Warburton himself has given us a detailed
account.
Warburton, a wide-read, pompous, and polemical clergyman, had introduced
himself to the notice of Pope by a defense of the philosophical and
religious principles of the 'Essay on Man'. In spite of the influence of
the free-thinking Bolingbroke, Pope still remained a member of the
Catholic church and sincerely believed himself to be an orthodox, though
liberal, Christian, and he had, in consequence, been greatly
disconcerted by a criticism of his poem published in Switzerland and
lately translated into English. Its author, Pierre de Crousaz,
maintained, and with a considerable degree of truth, that the principles
of Pope's poem if pushed to their logical conclusion were destructive to
religion and would rank their author rather among atheists than
defenders of the faith. The very word "atheist" was at that day
sufficient to put the man to whom it was applied beyond the pale of
polite society, and Pope, who quite lacked the ability to refute in
logical argument the attack of de Crousaz, was proportionately delighted
when Warburton came forward in his defense, and in a series of letters
asserted that Pope's whole intention was to vindicate the ways of God to
man, and that de Crousaz had mistaken his purpose and misunderstood his
language. Pope's gratitude to his defender knew no bounds; he declared
that Warburton understood the 'Essay' better than he did himself; he
pronounced him the greatest critic he ever knew, secured an introduction
to him, introduced him to his own rich and influential friends, in short
made the man's fortune for him outright. When the University of Oxford
hesitated to give Warburton, who had never attended a university, the
degree of D. D. , Pope declined to accept the degree of D. C. L. which had
been offered him at the same time, and wrote the Fourth Book of the
'Dunciad' to satirize the stupidity of the university authorities. In
conjunction with Warburton he proceeded further to revise the whole
poem, for which his new friend wrote notes and a ponderous introduction,
and made the capital mistake of substituting the frivolous, but clever,
Colley Gibber, with whom he had recently become embroiled, for his old
enemy, Theobald, as the hero. And the last year of his life was spent in
getting out new editions of his poems accompanied by elaborate
commentaries from the pen of Warburton.
In the spring of 1744, it was evident that Pope was failing fast. In
addition to his other ailments he was now attacked by an asthmatical
dropsy, which no efforts of his physicians could remove. Yet he
continued to work almost to the last, and distributed copies of his
'Ethic Epistles' to his friends about three weeks before his death, with
the smiling remark that like the dying Socrates he was dispensing his
morality among his friends.
As
a result Pope made something between ? 5000 and ? 6000, a sum absolutely
unprecedented in the history of English literature, and amply sufficient
to make him independent for life.
But the sum was honestly earned by hard and wearisome work. Pope was no
Greek scholar; it is said, indeed, that he was just able to make out the
sense of the original with a translation. And in addition to the fifteen
thousand lines of the 'Iliad', he had engaged to furnish an introduction
and notes. At first the magnitude of the undertaking frightened him.
"What terrible moments," he said to Spence, "does one feel after one has
engaged for a large work. In the beginning of my translating the
'Iliad', I wished anybody would hang me a hundred times. It sat so
heavily on my mind at first that I often used to dream of it and do
sometimes still. " In spite of his discouragement, however, and of the
ill health which so constantly beset him, Pope fell gallantly upon his
task, and as time went on came almost to enjoy it. He used to translate
thirty or forty verses in the morning before rising and, in his own
characteristic phrase, "piddled over them for the rest of the day. " He
used every assistance possible, drew freely upon the scholarship of
friends, corrected and recorrected with a view to obtaining clearness
and point, and finally succeeded in producing a version which not only
satisfied his own critical judgment, but was at once accepted by the
English-speaking world as the standard translation of Homer.
The first volume came out in June, 1715, and to Pope's dismay and wrath
a rival translation appeared almost simultaneously. Tickell, one of
Addison's "little senate," had also begun a translation of the 'Iliad',
and although he announced in the preface that he intended to withdraw in
favor of Pope and take up a translation of the 'Odyssey', the poet's
suspicions were at once aroused. And they were quickly fanned into a
flame by the gossip of the town which reported that Addison, the
recognized authority in literary criticism, pronounced Tickell's version
"the best that ever was in any language. " Rumor went so far, in fact, as
to hint pretty broadly that Addison himself was the author, in part, at
least, of Tickell's book; and Pope, who had been encouraged by Addison
to begin his long task, felt at once that he had been betrayed. His
resentment was all the more bitter since he fancied that Addison, now at
the height of his power and prosperity in the world of letters and of
politics, had attempted to ruin an enterprise on which the younger man
had set all his hopes of success and independence, for no better reason
than literary jealousy and political estrangement. We know now that Pope
was mistaken, but there was beyond question some reason at the time for
his thinking as he did, and it is to the bitterness which this incident
caused in his mind that we owe the famous satiric portrait of Addison as
Atticus.
The last volume of the 'Iliad' appeared in the spring of 1720, and in it
Pope gave a renewed proof of his independence by dedicating the whole
work, not to some lord who would have rewarded him with a handsome
present, but to his old acquaintance, Congreve, the last survivor of the
brilliant comic dramatists of Dryden's day. And now resting for a time
from his long labors, Pope turned to the adornment and cultivation of
the little house and garden that he had leased at Twickenham.
Pope's father had died in 1717, and the poet, rejecting politely but
firmly the suggestion of his friend, Atterbury, that he might now turn
Protestant, devoted himself with double tenderness to the care of his
aged and infirm mother. He brought her with him to Twickenham, where she
lived till 1733, dying in that year at the great age of ninety-one. It
may have been partly on her account that Pope pitched upon Twickenham as
his abiding place. Beautifully situated on the banks of the Thames, it
was at once a quiet country place and yet of easy access to London, to
Hampton Court, or to Kew. The five acres of land that lay about the
house furnished Pope with inexhaustible entertainment for the rest of
his life. He "twisted and twirled and harmonized" his bit of ground
"till it appeared two or three sweet little lawns opening and opening
beyond one another, the whole surrounded by impenetrable woods. "
Following the taste of his times in landscape gardening, he adorned his
lawns with artificial mounds, a shell temple, an obelisk, and a
colonnade. But the crowning glory was the grotto, a tunnel decorated
fantastically with shells and bits of looking-glass, which Pope dug
under a road that ran through his grounds. Here Pope received in state,
and his house and garden was for years the center of the most brilliant
society in England. Here Swift came on his rare visits from Ireland, and
Bolingbroke on his return from exile. Arbuthnot, Pope's beloved
physician, was a frequent visitor, and Peterborough, one of the most
distinguished of English soldiers, condescended to help lay out the
garden. Congreve came too, at times, and Gay, the laziest and most
good-natured of poets. Nor was the society of women lacking at these
gatherings. Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the wittiest woman in England,
was often there, until her bitter quarrel with the poet; the grim old
Duchess of Marlborough appeared once or twice in Pope's last years; and
the Princess of Wales came with her husband to inspire the leaders of
the opposition to the hated Walpole and the miserly king. And from first
to last, the good angel of the place was the blue-eyed, sweet-tempered
Patty Blount, Pope's best and dearest friend.
Not long after the completion of the 'Iliad', Pope undertook to edit
Shakespeare, and completed the work in 1724. The edition is, of course,
quite superseded now, but it has its place in the history of
Shakespearean studies as the first that made an effort, though irregular
and incomplete, to restore the true text by collation and conjecture. It
has its place, too, in the story of Pope's life, since the bitter
criticism which it received, all the more unpleasant to the poet since
it was in the main true, was one of the principal causes of his writing
the 'Dunciad'. Between the publication of his edition of Shakespeare,
however, and the appearance of the 'Dunciad', Pope resolved to complete
his translation of Homer, and with the assistance of a pair of friends,
got out a version of the Odyssey in 1725. Like the 'Iliad', this was
published by subscription, and as in the former case the greatest men in
England were eager to show their appreciation of the poet by filling up
his lists. Sir Robert Walpole, the great Whig statesman, took ten
copies, and Harley, the fallen Tory leader, put himself, his wife, and
his daughter down for sixteen. Pope made, it is said, about ? 3700 by
this work.
In 1726, Swift visited Pope and encouraged him to complete a satire
which he seems already to have begun on the dull critics and hack
writers of the day. For one cause or another its publication was
deferred until 1728, when it appeared under the title of the 'Dunciad'.
Here Pope declared open war upon his enemies. All those who had attacked
his works, abused his character, or scoffed at his personal deformities,
were caricatured as ridiculous and sometimes disgusting figures in a
mock epic poem celebrating the accession of a new monarch to the throne
of Dullness. The 'Dunciad' is little read to-day except by professed
students of English letters, but it made, naturally enough, a great stir
at the time and vastly provoked the wrath of all the dunces whose names
it dragged to light. Pope has often been blamed for stooping to such
ignoble combat, and in particular for the coarseness of his abuse, and
for his bitter jests upon the poverty of his opponents. But it must be
remembered that no living writer had been so scandalously abused as
Pope, and no writer that ever lived was by nature so quick to feel and
to resent insult. The undoubted coarseness of the work is in part due to
the gross license of the times in speech and writing, and more
particularly to the influence of Swift, at this time predominant over
Pope. And in regard to Pope's trick of taunting his enemies with
poverty, it must frankly be confessed that he seized upon this charge as
a ready and telling weapon. Pope was at heart one of the most charitable
of men. In the days of his prosperity he is said to have given away one
eighth of his income. And he was always quick to succor merit in
distress; he pensioned the poet Savage and he tried to secure patronage
for Johnson. But for the wretched hack writers of the common press who
had barked against him he had no mercy, and he struck them with the
first rod that lay ready to his hands.
During his work on the 'Dunciad', Pope came into intimate relations with
Bolingbroke, who in 1725 had returned from his long exile in France and
had settled at Dawley within easy reach of Pope's villa at Twickenham.
Bolingbroke was beyond doubt one of the most brilliant and stimulating
minds of his age. Without depth of intellect or solidity of character,
he was at once a philosopher, a statesman, a scholar, and a fascinating
talker. Pope, who had already made his acquaintance, was delighted to
renew and improve their intimacy, and soon came wholly under the
influence of his splendid friend. It is hardly too much to say that all
the rest of Pope's work is directly traceable to Bolingbroke. The 'Essay
on Man' was built up on the precepts of Bolingbroke's philosophy; the
'Imitations of Horace' were undertaken at Bolingbroke's suggestion; and
the whole tone of Pope's political and social satire during the years
from 1731 to 1738 reflects the spirit of that opposition to the
administration of Walpole and to the growing influence of the commercial
class, which was at once inspired and directed by Bolingbroke. And yet
it is exactly in the work of this period that we find the best and with
perhaps one exception, the 'Essay on Man', the most original, work of
Pope. He has obtained an absolute command over his instrument of
expression. In his hands the heroic couplet sings, and laughs, and
chats, and thunders. He has turned from the ignoble warfare with the
dunces to satirize courtly frivolity and wickedness in high places. And
most important of all to the student of Pope, it is in these last works
that his personality is most clearly revealed. It has been well said
that the best introduction to the study of Pope, the man, is to get the
'Epistle to Arbuthnot' by heart.
Pope gradually persuaded himself that all the works of these years, the
'Essay on Man', the 'Satires, Epistles', and 'Moral Essays', were but
parts of one stupendous whole. He told Spence in the last years of his
life: "I had once thought of completing my ethic work in four
books. --The first, you know, is on the Nature of Man [the 'Essay on
Man']; the second would have been on knowledge and its limits--here
would have come in an Essay on Education, part of which I have inserted
in the 'Dunciad' ['i. e. ' in the Fourth Book, published in 1742]. The
third was to have treated of Government, both ecclesiastical and
civil--and this was what chiefly stopped my going on. I could not have
said what 'I would' have said without provoking every church on the face
of the earth; and I did not care for living always in boiling
water. --This part would have come into my 'Brutus' [an epic poem which
Pope never completed], which is planned already. The fourth would have
been on Morality; in eight or nine of the most concerning branches of
it. "
It is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that Pope with his
irregular methods of work and illogical habit of thought had planned so
vast and elaborate a system before he began its execution. It is far
more likely that he followed his old method of composing on the
inspiration of the moment, and produced the works in question with
little thought of their relation or interdependence. But in the last
years of his life, when he had made the acquaintance of Warburton, and
was engaged in reviewing and perfecting the works of this period, he
noticed their general similarity in form and spirit, and, possibly under
Warburton's influence, conceived the notion of combining and
supplementing them to form that "Greater Essay on Man" of which he spoke
to Spence, and of which Warburton himself has given us a detailed
account.
Warburton, a wide-read, pompous, and polemical clergyman, had introduced
himself to the notice of Pope by a defense of the philosophical and
religious principles of the 'Essay on Man'. In spite of the influence of
the free-thinking Bolingbroke, Pope still remained a member of the
Catholic church and sincerely believed himself to be an orthodox, though
liberal, Christian, and he had, in consequence, been greatly
disconcerted by a criticism of his poem published in Switzerland and
lately translated into English. Its author, Pierre de Crousaz,
maintained, and with a considerable degree of truth, that the principles
of Pope's poem if pushed to their logical conclusion were destructive to
religion and would rank their author rather among atheists than
defenders of the faith. The very word "atheist" was at that day
sufficient to put the man to whom it was applied beyond the pale of
polite society, and Pope, who quite lacked the ability to refute in
logical argument the attack of de Crousaz, was proportionately delighted
when Warburton came forward in his defense, and in a series of letters
asserted that Pope's whole intention was to vindicate the ways of God to
man, and that de Crousaz had mistaken his purpose and misunderstood his
language. Pope's gratitude to his defender knew no bounds; he declared
that Warburton understood the 'Essay' better than he did himself; he
pronounced him the greatest critic he ever knew, secured an introduction
to him, introduced him to his own rich and influential friends, in short
made the man's fortune for him outright. When the University of Oxford
hesitated to give Warburton, who had never attended a university, the
degree of D. D. , Pope declined to accept the degree of D. C. L. which had
been offered him at the same time, and wrote the Fourth Book of the
'Dunciad' to satirize the stupidity of the university authorities. In
conjunction with Warburton he proceeded further to revise the whole
poem, for which his new friend wrote notes and a ponderous introduction,
and made the capital mistake of substituting the frivolous, but clever,
Colley Gibber, with whom he had recently become embroiled, for his old
enemy, Theobald, as the hero. And the last year of his life was spent in
getting out new editions of his poems accompanied by elaborate
commentaries from the pen of Warburton.
In the spring of 1744, it was evident that Pope was failing fast. In
addition to his other ailments he was now attacked by an asthmatical
dropsy, which no efforts of his physicians could remove. Yet he
continued to work almost to the last, and distributed copies of his
'Ethic Epistles' to his friends about three weeks before his death, with
the smiling remark that like the dying Socrates he was dispensing his
morality among his friends. His mind began to wander; he complained that
he saw all things as through a curtain, and told Spence once "with a
smile of great pleasure and with the greatest softness" that he had seen
a vision. His friends were devoted in their attendance. Bolingbroke sat
weeping by his chair, and on Spence's remarking how Pope with every
rally was always saying something kindly of his friends, replied: "I
never in my life knew a man that had so tender a heart for his
particular friends, or a more general friendship for mankind. I have
known him these thirty years; and value myself more for that man's love
than"--here his head dropped and his voice broke in tears. It was
noticed that whenever Patty Blount came into the room, the dying flame
of life flashed up in a momentary glow. At the very end a friend
reminded Pope that as a professed Catholic he ought to send for a
priest. The dying man replied that he did not believe it essential, but
thanked him for the suggestion. When the priest appeared, Pope attempted
to rise from his bed that he might receive the sacrament kneeling, and
the priest came out from the sick room "penetrated to the last degree
with the state of mind in which he found his penitent, resigned and
wrapt up in the love of God and man. " The hope that sustained Pope to
the end was that of immortality. "I am so certain of the soul's being
immortal," he whispered, almost with his last breath, "that I seem to
feel it within me, as it were by intuition. " He died on the evening of
May 30, so quietly that his friends hardly knew that the end had come.
He was buried in Twickenham Church, near the monument he had erected to
his parents, and his coffin was carried to the grave by six of the
poorest men of the parish.
It is plain even from so slight a sketch as this that the common
conception of Pope as "the wicked wasp of Twickenham," a bitter,
jealous, and malignant spirit, is utterly out of accord with the facts
of his life. Pope's faults of character lie on the surface, and the most
perceptible is that which has done him most harm in the eyes of
English-speaking men. He was by nature, perhaps by training also,
untruthful. If he seldom stooped to an outright lie, he never hesitated
to equivocate; and students of his life have found that it is seldom
possible to take his word on any point where his own works or interests
were concerned. I have already (p. x) attempted to point out the
probable cause of this defect; and it is, moreover, worth while to
remark that Pope's manifold intrigues and evasions were mainly of the
defensive order. He plotted and quibbled not so much to injure others as
to protect himself. To charge Pope with treachery to his friends, as has
sometimes been done, is wholly to misunderstand his character.
Another flaw, one can hardly call it a vice, in Pope's character was his
constant practice of considering everything that came in his way as
copy. It was this which led him to reclaim his early letters from his
friends, to alter, rewrite, and redate them, utterly unconscious of the
trouble which he was preparing for his future biographers. The letters,
he thought, were good reading but not so good as he could make them, and
he set to work to improve them with all an artist's zeal, and without a
trace of a historian's care for facts. It was this which led him to
embody in his description of a rich fool's splendid house and park
certain unmistakable traces of a living nobleman's estate and to start
in genuine amazement and regret when the world insisted on identifying
the nobleman and the fool. And when Pope had once done a good piece of
work, he had all an artist's reluctance to destroy it. He kept bits of
verse by him for years and inserted them into appropriate places in his
poems. This habit it was that brought about perhaps the gravest charge
that has ever been made against Pope, that of accepting ? 1000 to
suppress a satiric portrait of the old Duchess of Marlborough, and yet
of publishing it in a revision of a poem that he was engaged on just
before his death. The truth seems to be that Pope had drawn this
portrait in days when he was at bitter enmity with the Duchess, and
after the reconcilement that took place, unwilling to suppress it
entirely, had worked it over, and added passages out of keeping with the
first design, but pointing to another lady with whom he was now at odds.
Pope's behavior, we must admit, was not altogether creditable, but it
was that of an artist reluctant to throw away good work, not that of a
ruffian who stabs a woman he has taken money to spare.
Finally Pope was throughout his life, and notably in his later years,
the victim of an irritable temper and a quick, abusive tongue. His
irritability sprang in part, we may believe, from his physical
sufferings, even more, however, from the exquisitely sensitive heart
which made him feel a coarse insult as others would a blow. And of the
coarseness of the insults that were heaped upon Pope no one except the
careful student of his life can have any conception. His genius, his
morals, his person, his parents, and his religion were overwhelmed in
one indiscriminate flood of abuse. Too high spirited to submit tamely to
these attacks, too irritable to laugh at them, he struck back, and his
weapon was personal satire which cut like a whip and left a brand like a
hot iron. And if at times, as in the case of Addison, Pope was mistaken
in his object and assaulted one who was in no sense his enemy, the fault
lies not so much in his alleged malice as in the unhappy state of
warfare in which he lived.
Over against the faults of Pope we may set more than one noble
characteristic. The sensitive heart and impulsive temper that led him so
often into bitter warfare, made him also most susceptible to kindness
and quick to pity suffering. He was essentially of a tender and loving
nature, a devoted son, and a loyal friend, unwearied in acts of kindness
and generosity. His ruling passion, to use his own phrase, was a
devotion to letters, and he determined as early and worked as diligently
to make himself a poet as ever Milton did. His wretched body was
dominated by a high and eager mind, and he combined in an unparalleled
degree the fiery energy of the born poet with the tireless patience of
the trained artist.
But perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of Pope is his manly
independence. In an age when almost without exception his fellow-writers
stooped to accept a great man's patronage or sold their talents into the
slavery of politics, Pope stood aloof from patron and from party. He
repeatedly declined offers of money that were made him, even when no
condition was attached. He refused to change his religion, though he was
far from being a devout Catholic, in order to secure a comfortable
place. He relied upon his genius alone for his support, and his genius
gave him all that he asked, a modest competency. His relations with his
rich and powerful friends were marked by the same independent spirit. He
never cringed or flattered, but met them on even terms, and raised
himself by merit alone from his position as the unknown son of an humble
shopkeeper to be the friend and associate of the greatest fortunes and
most powerful minds in England. It is not too much to say that the
career of a man of letters as we know it to-day, a career at once
honorable and independent, takes its rise from the life and work of
Alexander Pope.
The long controversies that have raged about Pope's rank as a poet seem
at last to be drawing to a close; and it has become possible to strike a
balance between the exaggerated praise of his contemporaries and the
reckless depreciation of romantic critics. That he is not a poet of the
first order is plain, if for no other reason than that he never produced
a work in any of the greatest forms of poetry. The drama, the epic, the
lyric, were all outside his range. On the other hand, unless a
definition of poetry be framed--and Dr. Johnson has well remarked that
"to circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of
the definer"--which shall exclude all gnomic and satiric verse, and so
debar the claims of Hesiod, Juvenal, and Boileau, it is impossible to
deny that Pope is a true poet. Certain qualities of the highest poet
Pope no doubt lacked, lofty imagination, intense passion, wide human
sympathy. But within the narrow field which he marked out for his own he
approaches perfection as nearly as any English poet, and Pope's merit
consists not merely in the smoothness of his verse or the polish of
separate epigrams, as is so often stated, but quite as much in the vigor
of his conceptions and the unity and careful proportion of each poem as
a whole. It is not too much to say that 'The Rape of the Lock' is one of
the best-planned poems in any language. It is as symmetrical and
exquisitely finished as a Grecian temple.
Historically Pope represents the fullest embodiment of that spirit which
began to appear in English literature about the middle of the
seventeenth century, and which we are accustomed to call the "classical"
spirit. In essence this movement was a protest against the irregularity
and individual license of earlier poets. Instead of far-fetched wit and
fanciful diction, the classical school erected the standards of common
sense in conception and directness in expression. And in so doing they
restored poetry which had become the diversion of the few to the
possession of the many. Pope, for example, is preeminently the poet of
his time. He dealt with topics that were of general interest to the
society in which he lived; he pictured life as he saw it about him. And
this accounts for his prompt and general acceptance by the world of his
day.
For the student of English literature Pope's work has a threefold value.
It represents the highest achievement of one of the great movements in
the developments of English verse. It reflects with unerring accuracy
the life and thought of his time--not merely the outward life of beau
and belle in the days of Queen Anne, but the ideals of the age in art,
philosophy, and politics. And finally it teaches as hardly any other
body of English verse can be said to do, the perennial value of
conscious and controlling art. Pope's work lives and will live while
English poetry is read, not because of its inspiration, imagination, or
depth of thought, but by its unity of design, vigor of expression, and
perfection of finish--by those qualities, in short, which show the poet
as an artist in verse.
CHIEF DATES IN POPE'S LIFE
1688 Born, May 21.
1700 Moves to Binfield.
1709 'Pastorals'.
1711 'Essay on Criticism'.
1711-12 Contributes to 'Spectator'.
1712 'Rape of the Lock', first form.
1713 'Windsor Forest'.
1713 Issues proposals for translation of Homer.
1714 'Rape of the Lock', second form.
1715 First volume of the 'Iliad'.
1715 'Temple of Fame'.
1717 Pope's father dies.
1717 'Works', including some new poems.
1719 Settles at Twickenham.
1720 Sixth and last volume of the 'Iliad'.
1722 Begins translation of 'Odyssey'.
1725 Edits Shakespeare.
1726 Finishes translation of 'Odyssey'.
1727-8 'Miscellanies' by Pope and Swift.
1728-9 'Dunciad'.
1731-2 'Moral Essays': 'Of Taste', 'Of the Use of Riches'.
1733-4 'Essay on Man'.
1733-8 'Satires and Epistles'.
1735 'Works'.
1735 'Letters' published by Curll.
1741 'Works in Prose'; vol. II. includes the correspondence with Swift.
1742 Fourth book of 'Dunciad'.
1742 Revised 'Dunciad'.
1744 Died, May 30.
1751 First collected edition, published by Warburton, 9 vols.
* * * * *
SELECTIONS FROM POPE
* * * * *
THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
AN HEROI-COMICAL POEM
Nolueram, Belinda, tuos violare capillos;
Sed juvat, hoc precibus me tribuisse tuis.
Mart, [Epigr, XII.
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Title: The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems
Author: Alexander Pope
Posting Date: December 8, 2011 [EBook #9800]
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First Posted: October 18, 2003
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THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
AND OTHER POEMS
BY
ALEXANDER POPE
EDITED
WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES
BY
THOMAS MARC PARROTT, PH. D.
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
THIS EDITION PUBLISHED 1906
PREFACE
It has been the aim of the editor in preparing this little book to get
together sufficient material to afford a student in one of our high
schools or colleges adequate and typical specimens of the vigorous and
versatile genius of Alexander Pope. With this purpose he has included in
addition to 'The Rape of the Lock', the 'Essay on Criticism' as
furnishing the standard by which Pope himself expected his work to be
judged, the 'First Epistle' of the 'Essay on Man' as a characteristic
example of his didactic poetry, and the 'Epistle to Arbuthnot', both for
its exhibition of Pope's genius as a satirist and for the picture it
gives of the poet himself. To these are added the famous close of the
'Dunciad', the 'Ode to Solitude', a specimen of Pope's infrequent lyric
note, and the 'Epitaph on Gay'.
The first edition of 'The Rape of the Lock' has been given as an
appendix in order that the student may have the opportunity of comparing
the two forms of this poem, and of realizing the admirable art with
which Pope blended old and new in the version that is now the only one
known to the average reader. The text throughout is that of the Globe
Edition prepared by Professor A. W. Ward.
The editor can lay no claim to originality in the notes with which he
has attempted to explain and illustrate these poems. He is indebted at
every step to the labors of earlier editors, particularly to Elwin,
Courthope, Pattison, and Hales. If he has added anything of his own, it
has been in the way of defining certain words whose meaning or
connotation has changed since the time of Pope, and in paraphrasing
certain passages to bring out a meaning which has been partially
obscured by the poet's effort after brevity and concision.
In the general introduction the editor has aimed not so much to recite
the facts of Pope's life as to draw the portrait of a man whom he
believes to have been too often misunderstood and misrepresented. The
special introductions to the various poems are intended to acquaint the
student with the circumstances under which they were composed, to trace
their literary genesis and relationships, and, whenever necessary, to
give an outline of the train of thought which they embody.
In conclusion the editor would express the hope that his labors in the
preparation of this book may help, if only in some slight degree, to
stimulate the study of the work of a poet who, with all his limitations,
remains one of the abiding glories of English literature, and may
contribute not less to a proper appreciation of a man who with all his
faults was, on the evidence of those who knew him best, not only a great
poet, but a very human and lovable personality.
T. M. P.
'Princeton University', 'June' 4, 1906.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM
AN ESSAY ON MAN, EPISTLE I
AN EPISTLE TO DR ARBUTHNOT
ODE ON SOLITUDE
THE DESCENT OF DULLNESS [FROM THE 'Dunciad', BOOK IV]
EPITAPH ON GAY
NOTES
THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM
AN ESSAY ON MAN (EPISTLE I)
AN EPISTLE TO DR ARBUTHNOT
SELECTIONS
APPENDIX
THE FIRST EDITION OF THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
* * * * *
INTRODUCTION
Perhaps no other great poet in English Literature has been so
differently judged at different times as Alexander Pope. Accepted almost
on his first appearance as one of the leading poets of the day, he
rapidly became recognized as the foremost man of letters of his age. He
held this position throughout his life, and for over half a century
after his death his works were considered not only as masterpieces, but
as the finest models of poetry. With the change of poetic temper that
occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth century Pope's fame was
overshadowed. The romantic poets and critics even raised the question
whether Pope was a poet at all. And as his poetical fame diminished, the
harsh judgments of his personal character increased. It is almost
incredible with what exulting bitterness critics and editors of Pope
have tracked out and exposed his petty intrigues, exaggerated his
delinquencies, misrepresented his actions, attempted in short to blast
his character as a man.
Both as a man and as a poet Pope is sadly in need of a defender to-day.
And a defense is by no means impossible. The depreciation of Pope's
poetry springs, in the main, from an attempt to measure it by other
standards than those which he and his age recognized. The attacks upon
his character are due, in large measure, to a misunderstanding of the
spirit of the times in which he lived and to a forgetfulness of the
special circumstances of his own life. Tried in a fair court by
impartial judges Pope as a poet would be awarded a place, if not among
the noblest singers, at least high among poets of the second order. And
the flaws of character which even his warmest apologist must admit would
on the one hand be explained, if not excused, by circumstances, and on
the other more than counterbalanced by the existence of noble qualities
to which his assailants seem to have been quite blind.
Alexander Pope was born in London on May 21, 1688. His father was a
Roman Catholic linen draper, who had married a second time. Pope was the
only child of this marriage, and seems to have been a delicate,
sweet-tempered, precocious, and, perhaps, a rather spoiled child.
Pope's religion and his chronic ill-health are two facts of the highest
importance to be taken into consideration in any study of his life or
judgment of his character. The high hopes of the Catholics for a
restoration of their religion had been totally destroyed by the
Revolution of 1688. During all Pope's lifetime they were a sect at once
feared, hated, and oppressed by the severest laws. They were excluded
from the schools and universities, they were burdened with double taxes,
and forbidden to acquire real estate. All public careers were closed to
them, and their property and even their persons were in times of
excitement at the mercy of informers. In the last year of Pope's life a
proclamation was issued forbidding Catholics to come within ten miles of
London, and Pope himself, in spite of his influential friends, thought
it wise to comply with this edict. A fierce outburst of persecution
often evokes in the persecuted some of the noblest qualities of human
nature; but a long-continued and crushing tyranny that extends to all
the details of daily life is only too likely to have the most
unfortunate results on those who are subjected to it. And as a matter of
fact we find that the well-to-do Catholics of Pope's day lived in an
atmosphere of disaffection, political intrigue, and evasion of the law,
most unfavorable for the development of that frank, courageous, and
patriotic spirit for the lack of which Pope himself has so often been
made the object of reproach.
In a well-known passage of the 'Epistle to Arbuthnot', Pope has spoken
of his life as one long disease. He was in fact a humpbacked dwarf, not
over four feet six inches in height, with long, spider-like legs and
arms. He was subject to violent headaches, and his face was lined and
contracted with the marks of suffering. In youth he so completely ruined
his health by perpetual studies that his life was despaired of, and only
the most careful treatment saved him from an early death. Toward the
close of his life he became so weak that he could neither dress nor
undress without assistance. He had to be laced up in stiff stays in
order to sit erect, and wore a fur doublet and three pairs of stockings
to protect himself against the cold. With these physical defects he had
the extreme sensitiveness of mind that usually accompanies chronic ill
health, and this sensitiveness was outraged incessantly by the brutal
customs of the age. Pope's enemies made as free with his person as with
his poetry, and there is little doubt that he felt the former attacks
the more bitterly of the two. Dennis, his first critic, called him "a
short squab gentleman, the very bow of the God of love; his outward form
is downright monkey. " A rival poet whom he had offended hung up a rod in
a coffee house where men of letters resorted, and threatened to whip
Pope like a naughty child if he showed his face there. It is said,
though perhaps not on the best authority, that when Pope once forgot
himself so far as to make love to Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the lady's
answer was "a fit of immoderate laughter. " In an appendix to the
'Dunciad' Pope collected some of the epithets with which his enemies had
pelted him, "an ape," "an ass," "a frog," "a coward," "a fool," "a
little abject thing. " He affected, indeed, to despise his assailants,
but there is only too good evidence that their poisoned arrows rankled
in his heart. Richardson, the painter, found him one day reading the
latest abusive pamphlet. "These things are my diversion," said the poet,
striving to put the best face on it; but as he read, his friends saw his
features "writhen with anguish," and prayed to be delivered from all
such "diversions" as these. Pope's enemies and their savage abuse are
mostly forgotten to-day. Pope's furious retorts have been secured to
immortality by his genius. It would have been nobler, no doubt, to have
answered by silence only; but before one condemns Pope it is only fair
to realize the causes of his bitterness.
Pope's education was short and irregular. He was taught the rudiments of
Latin and Greek by his family priest, attended for a brief period a
school in the country and another in London, and at the early age of
twelve left school altogether, and settling down at his father's house
in the country began to read to his heart's delight. He roamed through
the classic poets, translating passages that pleased him, went up for a
time to London to get lessons in French and Italian, and above all read
with eagerness and attention the works of older English poets,--Spenser,
Waller, and Dryden. He had already, it would seem, determined to become
a poet, and his father, delighted with the clever boy's talent, used to
set him topics, force him to correct his verses over and over, and
finally, when satisfied, dismiss him with the praise, "These are good
rhymes. " He wrote a comedy, a tragedy, an epic poem, all of which he
afterward destroyed and, as he laughingly confessed in later years, he
thought himself "the greatest genius that ever was. "
Pope was not alone, however, in holding a high opinion of his talents.
While still a boy in his teens he was taken up and patronized by a
number of gentlemen, Trumbull, Walsh, and Cromwell, all dabblers in
poetry and criticism. He was introduced to the dramatist Wycherly,
nearly fifty years his senior, and helped to polish some of the old
man's verses. His own works were passed about in manuscript from hand to
hand till one of them came to the eyes of Dryden's old publisher,
Tonson. Tonson wrote Pope a respectful letter asking for the honor of
being allowed to publish them. One may fancy the delight with which the
sixteen-year-old boy received this offer. It is a proof of Pope's
patience as well as his precocity that he delayed three years before
accepting it. It was not till 1709 that his first published verses, the
'Pastorals', a fragment translated from Homer, and a modernized version
of one of the 'Canterbury Tales', appeared in Tonson's 'Miscellany'.
With the publication of the 'Pastorals', Pope embarked upon his life as
a man of letters. They seem to have brought him a certain recognition,
but hardly fame. That he obtained by his next poem, the 'Essay on
Criticism', which appeared in 1711. It was applauded in the 'Spectator',
and Pope seems about this time to have made the acquaintance of Addison
and the little senate which met in Button's coffee house. His poem the
'Messiah' appeared in the 'Spectator' in May 1712; the first draft of
'The Rape of the Lock' in a poetical miscellany in the same year, and
Addison's request, in 1713, that he compose a prologue for the tragedy
of 'Cato' set the final stamp upon his rank as a poet.
Pope's friendly relations with Addison and his circle were not, however,
long continued. In the year 1713 he gradually drew away from them and
came under the influence of Swift, then at the height of his power in
political and social life. Swift introduced him to the brilliant Tories,
politicians and lovers of letters, Harley, Bolingbroke, and Atterbury,
who were then at the head of affairs. Pope's new friends seem to have
treated him with a deference which he had never experienced before, and
which bound him to them in unbroken affection. Harley used to regret
that Pope's religion rendered him legally incapable of holding a
sinecure office in the government, such as was frequently bestowed in
those days upon men of letters, and Swift jestingly offered the young
poet twenty guineas to become a Protestant. But now, as later, Pope was
firmly resolved not to abandon the faith of his parents for the sake of
worldly advantage. And in order to secure the independence he valued so
highly he resolved to embark upon the great work of his life, the
translation of Homer.
"What led me into that," he told a friend long after, "was purely the
want of money. I had then none; not even to buy books. " It seems that
about this time, 1713, Pope's father had experienced some heavy
financial losses, and the poet, whose receipts in money had so far been
by no means in proportion to the reputation his works had brought him,
now resolved to use that reputation as a means of securing from the
public a sum which would at least keep him for life from poverty or the
necessity of begging for patronage. It is worth noting that Pope was the
first Englishman of letters who threw himself thus boldly upon the
public and earned his living by his pen.
The arrangements for the publication and sale of Pope's translation of
Homer were made with care and pushed on with enthusiasm. He issued in
1713 his proposals for an edition to be published by subscription, and
his friends at once became enthusiastic canvassers. We have a
characteristic picture of Swift at this time, bustling about a crowded
ante-chamber, and informing the company that the best poet in England
was Mr. Pope (a Papist) who had begun a translation of Homer for which
they must all subscribe, "for," says he, "the author shall not begin to
print till I have a thousand guineas for him. " The work was to be in six
volumes, each costing a guinea. Pope obtained 575 subscribers, many of
whom took more than one set. Lintot, the publisher, gave Pope ? 1200 for
the work and agreed to supply the subscription copies free of charge. As
a result Pope made something between ? 5000 and ? 6000, a sum absolutely
unprecedented in the history of English literature, and amply sufficient
to make him independent for life.
But the sum was honestly earned by hard and wearisome work. Pope was no
Greek scholar; it is said, indeed, that he was just able to make out the
sense of the original with a translation. And in addition to the fifteen
thousand lines of the 'Iliad', he had engaged to furnish an introduction
and notes. At first the magnitude of the undertaking frightened him.
"What terrible moments," he said to Spence, "does one feel after one has
engaged for a large work. In the beginning of my translating the
'Iliad', I wished anybody would hang me a hundred times. It sat so
heavily on my mind at first that I often used to dream of it and do
sometimes still. " In spite of his discouragement, however, and of the
ill health which so constantly beset him, Pope fell gallantly upon his
task, and as time went on came almost to enjoy it. He used to translate
thirty or forty verses in the morning before rising and, in his own
characteristic phrase, "piddled over them for the rest of the day. " He
used every assistance possible, drew freely upon the scholarship of
friends, corrected and recorrected with a view to obtaining clearness
and point, and finally succeeded in producing a version which not only
satisfied his own critical judgment, but was at once accepted by the
English-speaking world as the standard translation of Homer.
The first volume came out in June, 1715, and to Pope's dismay and wrath
a rival translation appeared almost simultaneously. Tickell, one of
Addison's "little senate," had also begun a translation of the 'Iliad',
and although he announced in the preface that he intended to withdraw in
favor of Pope and take up a translation of the 'Odyssey', the poet's
suspicions were at once aroused. And they were quickly fanned into a
flame by the gossip of the town which reported that Addison, the
recognized authority in literary criticism, pronounced Tickell's version
"the best that ever was in any language. " Rumor went so far, in fact, as
to hint pretty broadly that Addison himself was the author, in part, at
least, of Tickell's book; and Pope, who had been encouraged by Addison
to begin his long task, felt at once that he had been betrayed. His
resentment was all the more bitter since he fancied that Addison, now at
the height of his power and prosperity in the world of letters and of
politics, had attempted to ruin an enterprise on which the younger man
had set all his hopes of success and independence, for no better reason
than literary jealousy and political estrangement. We know now that Pope
was mistaken, but there was beyond question some reason at the time for
his thinking as he did, and it is to the bitterness which this incident
caused in his mind that we owe the famous satiric portrait of Addison as
Atticus.
The last volume of the 'Iliad' appeared in the spring of 1720, and in it
Pope gave a renewed proof of his independence by dedicating the whole
work, not to some lord who would have rewarded him with a handsome
present, but to his old acquaintance, Congreve, the last survivor of the
brilliant comic dramatists of Dryden's day. And now resting for a time
from his long labors, Pope turned to the adornment and cultivation of
the little house and garden that he had leased at Twickenham.
Pope's father had died in 1717, and the poet, rejecting politely but
firmly the suggestion of his friend, Atterbury, that he might now turn
Protestant, devoted himself with double tenderness to the care of his
aged and infirm mother. He brought her with him to Twickenham, where she
lived till 1733, dying in that year at the great age of ninety-one. It
may have been partly on her account that Pope pitched upon Twickenham as
his abiding place. Beautifully situated on the banks of the Thames, it
was at once a quiet country place and yet of easy access to London, to
Hampton Court, or to Kew. The five acres of land that lay about the
house furnished Pope with inexhaustible entertainment for the rest of
his life. He "twisted and twirled and harmonized" his bit of ground
"till it appeared two or three sweet little lawns opening and opening
beyond one another, the whole surrounded by impenetrable woods. "
Following the taste of his times in landscape gardening, he adorned his
lawns with artificial mounds, a shell temple, an obelisk, and a
colonnade. But the crowning glory was the grotto, a tunnel decorated
fantastically with shells and bits of looking-glass, which Pope dug
under a road that ran through his grounds. Here Pope received in state,
and his house and garden was for years the center of the most brilliant
society in England. Here Swift came on his rare visits from Ireland, and
Bolingbroke on his return from exile. Arbuthnot, Pope's beloved
physician, was a frequent visitor, and Peterborough, one of the most
distinguished of English soldiers, condescended to help lay out the
garden. Congreve came too, at times, and Gay, the laziest and most
good-natured of poets. Nor was the society of women lacking at these
gatherings. Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the wittiest woman in England,
was often there, until her bitter quarrel with the poet; the grim old
Duchess of Marlborough appeared once or twice in Pope's last years; and
the Princess of Wales came with her husband to inspire the leaders of
the opposition to the hated Walpole and the miserly king. And from first
to last, the good angel of the place was the blue-eyed, sweet-tempered
Patty Blount, Pope's best and dearest friend.
Not long after the completion of the 'Iliad', Pope undertook to edit
Shakespeare, and completed the work in 1724. The edition is, of course,
quite superseded now, but it has its place in the history of
Shakespearean studies as the first that made an effort, though irregular
and incomplete, to restore the true text by collation and conjecture. It
has its place, too, in the story of Pope's life, since the bitter
criticism which it received, all the more unpleasant to the poet since
it was in the main true, was one of the principal causes of his writing
the 'Dunciad'. Between the publication of his edition of Shakespeare,
however, and the appearance of the 'Dunciad', Pope resolved to complete
his translation of Homer, and with the assistance of a pair of friends,
got out a version of the Odyssey in 1725. Like the 'Iliad', this was
published by subscription, and as in the former case the greatest men in
England were eager to show their appreciation of the poet by filling up
his lists. Sir Robert Walpole, the great Whig statesman, took ten
copies, and Harley, the fallen Tory leader, put himself, his wife, and
his daughter down for sixteen. Pope made, it is said, about ? 3700 by
this work.
In 1726, Swift visited Pope and encouraged him to complete a satire
which he seems already to have begun on the dull critics and hack
writers of the day. For one cause or another its publication was
deferred until 1728, when it appeared under the title of the 'Dunciad'.
Here Pope declared open war upon his enemies. All those who had attacked
his works, abused his character, or scoffed at his personal deformities,
were caricatured as ridiculous and sometimes disgusting figures in a
mock epic poem celebrating the accession of a new monarch to the throne
of Dullness. The 'Dunciad' is little read to-day except by professed
students of English letters, but it made, naturally enough, a great stir
at the time and vastly provoked the wrath of all the dunces whose names
it dragged to light. Pope has often been blamed for stooping to such
ignoble combat, and in particular for the coarseness of his abuse, and
for his bitter jests upon the poverty of his opponents. But it must be
remembered that no living writer had been so scandalously abused as
Pope, and no writer that ever lived was by nature so quick to feel and
to resent insult. The undoubted coarseness of the work is in part due to
the gross license of the times in speech and writing, and more
particularly to the influence of Swift, at this time predominant over
Pope. And in regard to Pope's trick of taunting his enemies with
poverty, it must frankly be confessed that he seized upon this charge as
a ready and telling weapon. Pope was at heart one of the most charitable
of men. In the days of his prosperity he is said to have given away one
eighth of his income. And he was always quick to succor merit in
distress; he pensioned the poet Savage and he tried to secure patronage
for Johnson. But for the wretched hack writers of the common press who
had barked against him he had no mercy, and he struck them with the
first rod that lay ready to his hands.
During his work on the 'Dunciad', Pope came into intimate relations with
Bolingbroke, who in 1725 had returned from his long exile in France and
had settled at Dawley within easy reach of Pope's villa at Twickenham.
Bolingbroke was beyond doubt one of the most brilliant and stimulating
minds of his age. Without depth of intellect or solidity of character,
he was at once a philosopher, a statesman, a scholar, and a fascinating
talker. Pope, who had already made his acquaintance, was delighted to
renew and improve their intimacy, and soon came wholly under the
influence of his splendid friend. It is hardly too much to say that all
the rest of Pope's work is directly traceable to Bolingbroke. The 'Essay
on Man' was built up on the precepts of Bolingbroke's philosophy; the
'Imitations of Horace' were undertaken at Bolingbroke's suggestion; and
the whole tone of Pope's political and social satire during the years
from 1731 to 1738 reflects the spirit of that opposition to the
administration of Walpole and to the growing influence of the commercial
class, which was at once inspired and directed by Bolingbroke. And yet
it is exactly in the work of this period that we find the best and with
perhaps one exception, the 'Essay on Man', the most original, work of
Pope. He has obtained an absolute command over his instrument of
expression. In his hands the heroic couplet sings, and laughs, and
chats, and thunders. He has turned from the ignoble warfare with the
dunces to satirize courtly frivolity and wickedness in high places. And
most important of all to the student of Pope, it is in these last works
that his personality is most clearly revealed. It has been well said
that the best introduction to the study of Pope, the man, is to get the
'Epistle to Arbuthnot' by heart.
Pope gradually persuaded himself that all the works of these years, the
'Essay on Man', the 'Satires, Epistles', and 'Moral Essays', were but
parts of one stupendous whole. He told Spence in the last years of his
life: "I had once thought of completing my ethic work in four
books. --The first, you know, is on the Nature of Man [the 'Essay on
Man']; the second would have been on knowledge and its limits--here
would have come in an Essay on Education, part of which I have inserted
in the 'Dunciad' ['i. e. ' in the Fourth Book, published in 1742]. The
third was to have treated of Government, both ecclesiastical and
civil--and this was what chiefly stopped my going on. I could not have
said what 'I would' have said without provoking every church on the face
of the earth; and I did not care for living always in boiling
water. --This part would have come into my 'Brutus' [an epic poem which
Pope never completed], which is planned already. The fourth would have
been on Morality; in eight or nine of the most concerning branches of
it. "
It is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that Pope with his
irregular methods of work and illogical habit of thought had planned so
vast and elaborate a system before he began its execution. It is far
more likely that he followed his old method of composing on the
inspiration of the moment, and produced the works in question with
little thought of their relation or interdependence. But in the last
years of his life, when he had made the acquaintance of Warburton, and
was engaged in reviewing and perfecting the works of this period, he
noticed their general similarity in form and spirit, and, possibly under
Warburton's influence, conceived the notion of combining and
supplementing them to form that "Greater Essay on Man" of which he spoke
to Spence, and of which Warburton himself has given us a detailed
account.
Warburton, a wide-read, pompous, and polemical clergyman, had introduced
himself to the notice of Pope by a defense of the philosophical and
religious principles of the 'Essay on Man'. In spite of the influence of
the free-thinking Bolingbroke, Pope still remained a member of the
Catholic church and sincerely believed himself to be an orthodox, though
liberal, Christian, and he had, in consequence, been greatly
disconcerted by a criticism of his poem published in Switzerland and
lately translated into English. Its author, Pierre de Crousaz,
maintained, and with a considerable degree of truth, that the principles
of Pope's poem if pushed to their logical conclusion were destructive to
religion and would rank their author rather among atheists than
defenders of the faith. The very word "atheist" was at that day
sufficient to put the man to whom it was applied beyond the pale of
polite society, and Pope, who quite lacked the ability to refute in
logical argument the attack of de Crousaz, was proportionately delighted
when Warburton came forward in his defense, and in a series of letters
asserted that Pope's whole intention was to vindicate the ways of God to
man, and that de Crousaz had mistaken his purpose and misunderstood his
language. Pope's gratitude to his defender knew no bounds; he declared
that Warburton understood the 'Essay' better than he did himself; he
pronounced him the greatest critic he ever knew, secured an introduction
to him, introduced him to his own rich and influential friends, in short
made the man's fortune for him outright. When the University of Oxford
hesitated to give Warburton, who had never attended a university, the
degree of D. D. , Pope declined to accept the degree of D. C. L. which had
been offered him at the same time, and wrote the Fourth Book of the
'Dunciad' to satirize the stupidity of the university authorities. In
conjunction with Warburton he proceeded further to revise the whole
poem, for which his new friend wrote notes and a ponderous introduction,
and made the capital mistake of substituting the frivolous, but clever,
Colley Gibber, with whom he had recently become embroiled, for his old
enemy, Theobald, as the hero. And the last year of his life was spent in
getting out new editions of his poems accompanied by elaborate
commentaries from the pen of Warburton.
In the spring of 1744, it was evident that Pope was failing fast. In
addition to his other ailments he was now attacked by an asthmatical
dropsy, which no efforts of his physicians could remove. Yet he
continued to work almost to the last, and distributed copies of his
'Ethic Epistles' to his friends about three weeks before his death, with
the smiling remark that like the dying Socrates he was dispensing his
morality among his friends.
As
a result Pope made something between ? 5000 and ? 6000, a sum absolutely
unprecedented in the history of English literature, and amply sufficient
to make him independent for life.
But the sum was honestly earned by hard and wearisome work. Pope was no
Greek scholar; it is said, indeed, that he was just able to make out the
sense of the original with a translation. And in addition to the fifteen
thousand lines of the 'Iliad', he had engaged to furnish an introduction
and notes. At first the magnitude of the undertaking frightened him.
"What terrible moments," he said to Spence, "does one feel after one has
engaged for a large work. In the beginning of my translating the
'Iliad', I wished anybody would hang me a hundred times. It sat so
heavily on my mind at first that I often used to dream of it and do
sometimes still. " In spite of his discouragement, however, and of the
ill health which so constantly beset him, Pope fell gallantly upon his
task, and as time went on came almost to enjoy it. He used to translate
thirty or forty verses in the morning before rising and, in his own
characteristic phrase, "piddled over them for the rest of the day. " He
used every assistance possible, drew freely upon the scholarship of
friends, corrected and recorrected with a view to obtaining clearness
and point, and finally succeeded in producing a version which not only
satisfied his own critical judgment, but was at once accepted by the
English-speaking world as the standard translation of Homer.
The first volume came out in June, 1715, and to Pope's dismay and wrath
a rival translation appeared almost simultaneously. Tickell, one of
Addison's "little senate," had also begun a translation of the 'Iliad',
and although he announced in the preface that he intended to withdraw in
favor of Pope and take up a translation of the 'Odyssey', the poet's
suspicions were at once aroused. And they were quickly fanned into a
flame by the gossip of the town which reported that Addison, the
recognized authority in literary criticism, pronounced Tickell's version
"the best that ever was in any language. " Rumor went so far, in fact, as
to hint pretty broadly that Addison himself was the author, in part, at
least, of Tickell's book; and Pope, who had been encouraged by Addison
to begin his long task, felt at once that he had been betrayed. His
resentment was all the more bitter since he fancied that Addison, now at
the height of his power and prosperity in the world of letters and of
politics, had attempted to ruin an enterprise on which the younger man
had set all his hopes of success and independence, for no better reason
than literary jealousy and political estrangement. We know now that Pope
was mistaken, but there was beyond question some reason at the time for
his thinking as he did, and it is to the bitterness which this incident
caused in his mind that we owe the famous satiric portrait of Addison as
Atticus.
The last volume of the 'Iliad' appeared in the spring of 1720, and in it
Pope gave a renewed proof of his independence by dedicating the whole
work, not to some lord who would have rewarded him with a handsome
present, but to his old acquaintance, Congreve, the last survivor of the
brilliant comic dramatists of Dryden's day. And now resting for a time
from his long labors, Pope turned to the adornment and cultivation of
the little house and garden that he had leased at Twickenham.
Pope's father had died in 1717, and the poet, rejecting politely but
firmly the suggestion of his friend, Atterbury, that he might now turn
Protestant, devoted himself with double tenderness to the care of his
aged and infirm mother. He brought her with him to Twickenham, where she
lived till 1733, dying in that year at the great age of ninety-one. It
may have been partly on her account that Pope pitched upon Twickenham as
his abiding place. Beautifully situated on the banks of the Thames, it
was at once a quiet country place and yet of easy access to London, to
Hampton Court, or to Kew. The five acres of land that lay about the
house furnished Pope with inexhaustible entertainment for the rest of
his life. He "twisted and twirled and harmonized" his bit of ground
"till it appeared two or three sweet little lawns opening and opening
beyond one another, the whole surrounded by impenetrable woods. "
Following the taste of his times in landscape gardening, he adorned his
lawns with artificial mounds, a shell temple, an obelisk, and a
colonnade. But the crowning glory was the grotto, a tunnel decorated
fantastically with shells and bits of looking-glass, which Pope dug
under a road that ran through his grounds. Here Pope received in state,
and his house and garden was for years the center of the most brilliant
society in England. Here Swift came on his rare visits from Ireland, and
Bolingbroke on his return from exile. Arbuthnot, Pope's beloved
physician, was a frequent visitor, and Peterborough, one of the most
distinguished of English soldiers, condescended to help lay out the
garden. Congreve came too, at times, and Gay, the laziest and most
good-natured of poets. Nor was the society of women lacking at these
gatherings. Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the wittiest woman in England,
was often there, until her bitter quarrel with the poet; the grim old
Duchess of Marlborough appeared once or twice in Pope's last years; and
the Princess of Wales came with her husband to inspire the leaders of
the opposition to the hated Walpole and the miserly king. And from first
to last, the good angel of the place was the blue-eyed, sweet-tempered
Patty Blount, Pope's best and dearest friend.
Not long after the completion of the 'Iliad', Pope undertook to edit
Shakespeare, and completed the work in 1724. The edition is, of course,
quite superseded now, but it has its place in the history of
Shakespearean studies as the first that made an effort, though irregular
and incomplete, to restore the true text by collation and conjecture. It
has its place, too, in the story of Pope's life, since the bitter
criticism which it received, all the more unpleasant to the poet since
it was in the main true, was one of the principal causes of his writing
the 'Dunciad'. Between the publication of his edition of Shakespeare,
however, and the appearance of the 'Dunciad', Pope resolved to complete
his translation of Homer, and with the assistance of a pair of friends,
got out a version of the Odyssey in 1725. Like the 'Iliad', this was
published by subscription, and as in the former case the greatest men in
England were eager to show their appreciation of the poet by filling up
his lists. Sir Robert Walpole, the great Whig statesman, took ten
copies, and Harley, the fallen Tory leader, put himself, his wife, and
his daughter down for sixteen. Pope made, it is said, about ? 3700 by
this work.
In 1726, Swift visited Pope and encouraged him to complete a satire
which he seems already to have begun on the dull critics and hack
writers of the day. For one cause or another its publication was
deferred until 1728, when it appeared under the title of the 'Dunciad'.
Here Pope declared open war upon his enemies. All those who had attacked
his works, abused his character, or scoffed at his personal deformities,
were caricatured as ridiculous and sometimes disgusting figures in a
mock epic poem celebrating the accession of a new monarch to the throne
of Dullness. The 'Dunciad' is little read to-day except by professed
students of English letters, but it made, naturally enough, a great stir
at the time and vastly provoked the wrath of all the dunces whose names
it dragged to light. Pope has often been blamed for stooping to such
ignoble combat, and in particular for the coarseness of his abuse, and
for his bitter jests upon the poverty of his opponents. But it must be
remembered that no living writer had been so scandalously abused as
Pope, and no writer that ever lived was by nature so quick to feel and
to resent insult. The undoubted coarseness of the work is in part due to
the gross license of the times in speech and writing, and more
particularly to the influence of Swift, at this time predominant over
Pope. And in regard to Pope's trick of taunting his enemies with
poverty, it must frankly be confessed that he seized upon this charge as
a ready and telling weapon. Pope was at heart one of the most charitable
of men. In the days of his prosperity he is said to have given away one
eighth of his income. And he was always quick to succor merit in
distress; he pensioned the poet Savage and he tried to secure patronage
for Johnson. But for the wretched hack writers of the common press who
had barked against him he had no mercy, and he struck them with the
first rod that lay ready to his hands.
During his work on the 'Dunciad', Pope came into intimate relations with
Bolingbroke, who in 1725 had returned from his long exile in France and
had settled at Dawley within easy reach of Pope's villa at Twickenham.
Bolingbroke was beyond doubt one of the most brilliant and stimulating
minds of his age. Without depth of intellect or solidity of character,
he was at once a philosopher, a statesman, a scholar, and a fascinating
talker. Pope, who had already made his acquaintance, was delighted to
renew and improve their intimacy, and soon came wholly under the
influence of his splendid friend. It is hardly too much to say that all
the rest of Pope's work is directly traceable to Bolingbroke. The 'Essay
on Man' was built up on the precepts of Bolingbroke's philosophy; the
'Imitations of Horace' were undertaken at Bolingbroke's suggestion; and
the whole tone of Pope's political and social satire during the years
from 1731 to 1738 reflects the spirit of that opposition to the
administration of Walpole and to the growing influence of the commercial
class, which was at once inspired and directed by Bolingbroke. And yet
it is exactly in the work of this period that we find the best and with
perhaps one exception, the 'Essay on Man', the most original, work of
Pope. He has obtained an absolute command over his instrument of
expression. In his hands the heroic couplet sings, and laughs, and
chats, and thunders. He has turned from the ignoble warfare with the
dunces to satirize courtly frivolity and wickedness in high places. And
most important of all to the student of Pope, it is in these last works
that his personality is most clearly revealed. It has been well said
that the best introduction to the study of Pope, the man, is to get the
'Epistle to Arbuthnot' by heart.
Pope gradually persuaded himself that all the works of these years, the
'Essay on Man', the 'Satires, Epistles', and 'Moral Essays', were but
parts of one stupendous whole. He told Spence in the last years of his
life: "I had once thought of completing my ethic work in four
books. --The first, you know, is on the Nature of Man [the 'Essay on
Man']; the second would have been on knowledge and its limits--here
would have come in an Essay on Education, part of which I have inserted
in the 'Dunciad' ['i. e. ' in the Fourth Book, published in 1742]. The
third was to have treated of Government, both ecclesiastical and
civil--and this was what chiefly stopped my going on. I could not have
said what 'I would' have said without provoking every church on the face
of the earth; and I did not care for living always in boiling
water. --This part would have come into my 'Brutus' [an epic poem which
Pope never completed], which is planned already. The fourth would have
been on Morality; in eight or nine of the most concerning branches of
it. "
It is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that Pope with his
irregular methods of work and illogical habit of thought had planned so
vast and elaborate a system before he began its execution. It is far
more likely that he followed his old method of composing on the
inspiration of the moment, and produced the works in question with
little thought of their relation or interdependence. But in the last
years of his life, when he had made the acquaintance of Warburton, and
was engaged in reviewing and perfecting the works of this period, he
noticed their general similarity in form and spirit, and, possibly under
Warburton's influence, conceived the notion of combining and
supplementing them to form that "Greater Essay on Man" of which he spoke
to Spence, and of which Warburton himself has given us a detailed
account.
Warburton, a wide-read, pompous, and polemical clergyman, had introduced
himself to the notice of Pope by a defense of the philosophical and
religious principles of the 'Essay on Man'. In spite of the influence of
the free-thinking Bolingbroke, Pope still remained a member of the
Catholic church and sincerely believed himself to be an orthodox, though
liberal, Christian, and he had, in consequence, been greatly
disconcerted by a criticism of his poem published in Switzerland and
lately translated into English. Its author, Pierre de Crousaz,
maintained, and with a considerable degree of truth, that the principles
of Pope's poem if pushed to their logical conclusion were destructive to
religion and would rank their author rather among atheists than
defenders of the faith. The very word "atheist" was at that day
sufficient to put the man to whom it was applied beyond the pale of
polite society, and Pope, who quite lacked the ability to refute in
logical argument the attack of de Crousaz, was proportionately delighted
when Warburton came forward in his defense, and in a series of letters
asserted that Pope's whole intention was to vindicate the ways of God to
man, and that de Crousaz had mistaken his purpose and misunderstood his
language. Pope's gratitude to his defender knew no bounds; he declared
that Warburton understood the 'Essay' better than he did himself; he
pronounced him the greatest critic he ever knew, secured an introduction
to him, introduced him to his own rich and influential friends, in short
made the man's fortune for him outright. When the University of Oxford
hesitated to give Warburton, who had never attended a university, the
degree of D. D. , Pope declined to accept the degree of D. C. L. which had
been offered him at the same time, and wrote the Fourth Book of the
'Dunciad' to satirize the stupidity of the university authorities. In
conjunction with Warburton he proceeded further to revise the whole
poem, for which his new friend wrote notes and a ponderous introduction,
and made the capital mistake of substituting the frivolous, but clever,
Colley Gibber, with whom he had recently become embroiled, for his old
enemy, Theobald, as the hero. And the last year of his life was spent in
getting out new editions of his poems accompanied by elaborate
commentaries from the pen of Warburton.
In the spring of 1744, it was evident that Pope was failing fast. In
addition to his other ailments he was now attacked by an asthmatical
dropsy, which no efforts of his physicians could remove. Yet he
continued to work almost to the last, and distributed copies of his
'Ethic Epistles' to his friends about three weeks before his death, with
the smiling remark that like the dying Socrates he was dispensing his
morality among his friends. His mind began to wander; he complained that
he saw all things as through a curtain, and told Spence once "with a
smile of great pleasure and with the greatest softness" that he had seen
a vision. His friends were devoted in their attendance. Bolingbroke sat
weeping by his chair, and on Spence's remarking how Pope with every
rally was always saying something kindly of his friends, replied: "I
never in my life knew a man that had so tender a heart for his
particular friends, or a more general friendship for mankind. I have
known him these thirty years; and value myself more for that man's love
than"--here his head dropped and his voice broke in tears. It was
noticed that whenever Patty Blount came into the room, the dying flame
of life flashed up in a momentary glow. At the very end a friend
reminded Pope that as a professed Catholic he ought to send for a
priest. The dying man replied that he did not believe it essential, but
thanked him for the suggestion. When the priest appeared, Pope attempted
to rise from his bed that he might receive the sacrament kneeling, and
the priest came out from the sick room "penetrated to the last degree
with the state of mind in which he found his penitent, resigned and
wrapt up in the love of God and man. " The hope that sustained Pope to
the end was that of immortality. "I am so certain of the soul's being
immortal," he whispered, almost with his last breath, "that I seem to
feel it within me, as it were by intuition. " He died on the evening of
May 30, so quietly that his friends hardly knew that the end had come.
He was buried in Twickenham Church, near the monument he had erected to
his parents, and his coffin was carried to the grave by six of the
poorest men of the parish.
It is plain even from so slight a sketch as this that the common
conception of Pope as "the wicked wasp of Twickenham," a bitter,
jealous, and malignant spirit, is utterly out of accord with the facts
of his life. Pope's faults of character lie on the surface, and the most
perceptible is that which has done him most harm in the eyes of
English-speaking men. He was by nature, perhaps by training also,
untruthful. If he seldom stooped to an outright lie, he never hesitated
to equivocate; and students of his life have found that it is seldom
possible to take his word on any point where his own works or interests
were concerned. I have already (p. x) attempted to point out the
probable cause of this defect; and it is, moreover, worth while to
remark that Pope's manifold intrigues and evasions were mainly of the
defensive order. He plotted and quibbled not so much to injure others as
to protect himself. To charge Pope with treachery to his friends, as has
sometimes been done, is wholly to misunderstand his character.
Another flaw, one can hardly call it a vice, in Pope's character was his
constant practice of considering everything that came in his way as
copy. It was this which led him to reclaim his early letters from his
friends, to alter, rewrite, and redate them, utterly unconscious of the
trouble which he was preparing for his future biographers. The letters,
he thought, were good reading but not so good as he could make them, and
he set to work to improve them with all an artist's zeal, and without a
trace of a historian's care for facts. It was this which led him to
embody in his description of a rich fool's splendid house and park
certain unmistakable traces of a living nobleman's estate and to start
in genuine amazement and regret when the world insisted on identifying
the nobleman and the fool. And when Pope had once done a good piece of
work, he had all an artist's reluctance to destroy it. He kept bits of
verse by him for years and inserted them into appropriate places in his
poems. This habit it was that brought about perhaps the gravest charge
that has ever been made against Pope, that of accepting ? 1000 to
suppress a satiric portrait of the old Duchess of Marlborough, and yet
of publishing it in a revision of a poem that he was engaged on just
before his death. The truth seems to be that Pope had drawn this
portrait in days when he was at bitter enmity with the Duchess, and
after the reconcilement that took place, unwilling to suppress it
entirely, had worked it over, and added passages out of keeping with the
first design, but pointing to another lady with whom he was now at odds.
Pope's behavior, we must admit, was not altogether creditable, but it
was that of an artist reluctant to throw away good work, not that of a
ruffian who stabs a woman he has taken money to spare.
Finally Pope was throughout his life, and notably in his later years,
the victim of an irritable temper and a quick, abusive tongue. His
irritability sprang in part, we may believe, from his physical
sufferings, even more, however, from the exquisitely sensitive heart
which made him feel a coarse insult as others would a blow. And of the
coarseness of the insults that were heaped upon Pope no one except the
careful student of his life can have any conception. His genius, his
morals, his person, his parents, and his religion were overwhelmed in
one indiscriminate flood of abuse. Too high spirited to submit tamely to
these attacks, too irritable to laugh at them, he struck back, and his
weapon was personal satire which cut like a whip and left a brand like a
hot iron. And if at times, as in the case of Addison, Pope was mistaken
in his object and assaulted one who was in no sense his enemy, the fault
lies not so much in his alleged malice as in the unhappy state of
warfare in which he lived.
Over against the faults of Pope we may set more than one noble
characteristic. The sensitive heart and impulsive temper that led him so
often into bitter warfare, made him also most susceptible to kindness
and quick to pity suffering. He was essentially of a tender and loving
nature, a devoted son, and a loyal friend, unwearied in acts of kindness
and generosity. His ruling passion, to use his own phrase, was a
devotion to letters, and he determined as early and worked as diligently
to make himself a poet as ever Milton did. His wretched body was
dominated by a high and eager mind, and he combined in an unparalleled
degree the fiery energy of the born poet with the tireless patience of
the trained artist.
But perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of Pope is his manly
independence. In an age when almost without exception his fellow-writers
stooped to accept a great man's patronage or sold their talents into the
slavery of politics, Pope stood aloof from patron and from party. He
repeatedly declined offers of money that were made him, even when no
condition was attached. He refused to change his religion, though he was
far from being a devout Catholic, in order to secure a comfortable
place. He relied upon his genius alone for his support, and his genius
gave him all that he asked, a modest competency. His relations with his
rich and powerful friends were marked by the same independent spirit. He
never cringed or flattered, but met them on even terms, and raised
himself by merit alone from his position as the unknown son of an humble
shopkeeper to be the friend and associate of the greatest fortunes and
most powerful minds in England. It is not too much to say that the
career of a man of letters as we know it to-day, a career at once
honorable and independent, takes its rise from the life and work of
Alexander Pope.
The long controversies that have raged about Pope's rank as a poet seem
at last to be drawing to a close; and it has become possible to strike a
balance between the exaggerated praise of his contemporaries and the
reckless depreciation of romantic critics. That he is not a poet of the
first order is plain, if for no other reason than that he never produced
a work in any of the greatest forms of poetry. The drama, the epic, the
lyric, were all outside his range. On the other hand, unless a
definition of poetry be framed--and Dr. Johnson has well remarked that
"to circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of
the definer"--which shall exclude all gnomic and satiric verse, and so
debar the claims of Hesiod, Juvenal, and Boileau, it is impossible to
deny that Pope is a true poet. Certain qualities of the highest poet
Pope no doubt lacked, lofty imagination, intense passion, wide human
sympathy. But within the narrow field which he marked out for his own he
approaches perfection as nearly as any English poet, and Pope's merit
consists not merely in the smoothness of his verse or the polish of
separate epigrams, as is so often stated, but quite as much in the vigor
of his conceptions and the unity and careful proportion of each poem as
a whole. It is not too much to say that 'The Rape of the Lock' is one of
the best-planned poems in any language. It is as symmetrical and
exquisitely finished as a Grecian temple.
Historically Pope represents the fullest embodiment of that spirit which
began to appear in English literature about the middle of the
seventeenth century, and which we are accustomed to call the "classical"
spirit. In essence this movement was a protest against the irregularity
and individual license of earlier poets. Instead of far-fetched wit and
fanciful diction, the classical school erected the standards of common
sense in conception and directness in expression. And in so doing they
restored poetry which had become the diversion of the few to the
possession of the many. Pope, for example, is preeminently the poet of
his time. He dealt with topics that were of general interest to the
society in which he lived; he pictured life as he saw it about him. And
this accounts for his prompt and general acceptance by the world of his
day.
For the student of English literature Pope's work has a threefold value.
It represents the highest achievement of one of the great movements in
the developments of English verse. It reflects with unerring accuracy
the life and thought of his time--not merely the outward life of beau
and belle in the days of Queen Anne, but the ideals of the age in art,
philosophy, and politics. And finally it teaches as hardly any other
body of English verse can be said to do, the perennial value of
conscious and controlling art. Pope's work lives and will live while
English poetry is read, not because of its inspiration, imagination, or
depth of thought, but by its unity of design, vigor of expression, and
perfection of finish--by those qualities, in short, which show the poet
as an artist in verse.
CHIEF DATES IN POPE'S LIFE
1688 Born, May 21.
1700 Moves to Binfield.
1709 'Pastorals'.
1711 'Essay on Criticism'.
1711-12 Contributes to 'Spectator'.
1712 'Rape of the Lock', first form.
1713 'Windsor Forest'.
1713 Issues proposals for translation of Homer.
1714 'Rape of the Lock', second form.
1715 First volume of the 'Iliad'.
1715 'Temple of Fame'.
1717 Pope's father dies.
1717 'Works', including some new poems.
1719 Settles at Twickenham.
1720 Sixth and last volume of the 'Iliad'.
1722 Begins translation of 'Odyssey'.
1725 Edits Shakespeare.
1726 Finishes translation of 'Odyssey'.
1727-8 'Miscellanies' by Pope and Swift.
1728-9 'Dunciad'.
1731-2 'Moral Essays': 'Of Taste', 'Of the Use of Riches'.
1733-4 'Essay on Man'.
1733-8 'Satires and Epistles'.
1735 'Works'.
1735 'Letters' published by Curll.
1741 'Works in Prose'; vol. II. includes the correspondence with Swift.
1742 Fourth book of 'Dunciad'.
1742 Revised 'Dunciad'.
1744 Died, May 30.
1751 First collected edition, published by Warburton, 9 vols.
* * * * *
SELECTIONS FROM POPE
* * * * *
THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
AN HEROI-COMICAL POEM
Nolueram, Belinda, tuos violare capillos;
Sed juvat, hoc precibus me tribuisse tuis.
Mart, [Epigr, XII.
