The main
features
of
his style were now formed.
his style were now formed.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v09
These lay sermons are
accompanied by a few verse paraphrases of the Psalms, rendered
with polished simplicity, and are varied by allegories, among which
The First Vision of Mirza is justly celebrated for its tranquil,
lofty style.
The Spectator's last number appeared on 6 December 1712.
Both writers had cultivated to a surprising degree the art of
the Aâneur and knew how to turn innumerable and generally
unnoticed episodes of city life into charming sketches. Such
things as a sensation in a coffeehouse, a fencing-match, an argu-
ment in a bookshop, an old beggar, or a man who applauds with a
stick in a theatre gallery, are among their best studies of character'.
But, apparently, both editors had written themselves out. Addison,
at the instigation of his friends, set to work on Cato, the first four
acts of which had been written before the beginning of The Tatler,
perhaps as early as 1703. With many misgivings, he allowed the
tragedy to be produced at Drury lane on 14 April 1713. It was
a time of great political excitement; and, when so prominent a
public man as Addison produced a drama on Cato's last stand for
liberty, against the usurpation of Caesar, both parties turned the
situation against their opponents and applauded furiously. In any
event, the play was bound to have been a success. It pictures the
last of the Roman republicans, a statuesque outline magnanimous
and unmoved, surrounded by a treachery which is baffled by the
loyalty of his sons and Juba, accepting death rather than dishonour
and, in his last moments, taking thought for those around him.
The plot is twofold. Side by side with the study in public virtue
and high politics, a drama of the tender passion occupies the stage.
When Cato's son Marcius dies gallantly fighting against the traitor
Syphax, his brother wins the hand of Lucia, for which they had
a
i Nos. 185, 201, 483,
· Nos. 120, 121, 387, 489, 494, 495, 531, 543.
3 Nos. 207, 237, 391, 441.
- Nos. 186, 213, 219, 381, 483.
5 See respectively non. 403 and 481, 436, 438, 376, 235.
9
## p. 64 (#88) ##############################################
64
Steele and Addison
both been honourable rivals, and Juba, the once rejected suitor of
Marcia, Cato's daughter, romantically rescues her from the clutches
of Sempronius in disguise and finds that she has loved him all the
time. Thus, in the consecrated form of a Roman tragedy, the public
enjoyed that grandiose, if unsubstantial, projection of character
which they admired in Milton, together with the sentimental
chivalry of a French romance. To modern taste, the diction is
hopelessly declamatory, and the plot full of absurdities. But the
ordinary reader of the eighteenth century would almost regard
such artificiality as inevitable in a play which has strictly observed
the unities, contains a 'reversal of intention' and a 'recognition”
and abounds in crisp and quotable epigrams.
Meanwhile, Steele plunged into politics and, after much
pamphleteering, was expelled from the House of Commons for
uttering seditious libels. In 1714, he returned to literature and
started several periodicals, especially The Guardian, to which
Addison contributed fifty-one papers; and, in 1722, he produced
his last complete comedy, The Conscious Lovers. Though the plot
is largely borrowed from Terence's Andria and, where original,
abounds in more glaring improbabilities than his earlier work, the
play is remarkable because it resumes in brief all Steele's best
ideas on life and character. We have the sketch of servants whose
natural freshness is being gradually tainted by the corrupt and
contagious air of lackeydom? ; we have satire on marriages of
convenience, duelling and the chicanery of the law; a glance at
the opposition between the hereditary gentry and the rising
commercial class ; while, in Bevil junior, Steele portrays his ideal
of a gentleman, chivalrous and honourable to women, considerate
to men, respectful to his father and self-controlled amid the riotous
pleasures of the capital.
Steele and Addison produced other works separately. But,
when they ceased to collaborate in The Spectator, which was
subsequently continued by one of their circle, both became
authors of secondary importance. Their task was already done.
The peculiar circumstances of their lives gave them an unrivalled
opportunity of observing the movement of their time. Thanks
to a certain conventionality of intellect, coupled with amazing
1 The repetétela and ávarrópions of Aristotle; see Politics, ed. Butcher, 8. H. , 3rd
ed. 1902.
2 Besides the scenes in which Tom and Phillis appear, see the episode of the footboy
newly arrived in London, act v, sc. 2.
8 See bibliography.
## p. 65 (#89) ##############################################
Steele, Addison and the Essay
65
cleverness, they became the heart of this movement, and made it
literature. In this sense, they collaborated with their age. As a
comparison between the two writers is almost inevitable, it may
be said, in conclusion, that Steele was the more original and
Addison the more effective. Steele conceived the periodical essay,
but never perfected it; he accidentally discovered the short story
and verged upon the domestic novel, without substantially in-
fluencing the development of either genre. This ineffectiveness
was partly due to his volatile nature and somewhat unstable life,
but it was also largely due to the presence of Addison. That
successful and self-contained mentor seems to have unconsciously
restrained Steele's initiative. But, while he curbed his companion's
talents, he displayed the utmost efficiency in the use of his own
and, without any deep fund of ideas or sympathy, raised Steele’s
conception of an essay to a degree of perfection never since
surpassed. The Londoners of queen Anne's reign chiefly valued
The Spectator for Addison's humorous papers and religious dis-
sertations. The modern student most admires its accuracy and
penetration, and the true and long-enduring picture which it gives
of middle class culture and character.
E. L. IX.
CH, II.
5
## p. 66 (#90) ##############################################
CHAPTER III
POPE
The great writer of whom this chapter treats was a man of real
poetic genius, the growth and direction of which were powerfully
affected by his physical constitution, his circumstances and the
character of the age. None of his achievements belong to the
very highest forms of poetry. Where he excelled, his pre-eminence
is beyond dispute; yet his deficiency in qualities more prized by
a later generation has imperilled his very right to be regarded as
a poet. On certain points, all are practically agreed. Pope is
a memorable example of a conscious literary artist, the type in
our country of the classical spirit; rarely has a poet shown
himself a truer or more delicate representative of his own time.
Even did his work no longer appeal to us by its enduring
merit, he must escape neglect because of his part in England's
literary development.
Pope's true position has not always been recognised. He has
been viewed from the standpoint of periods out of sympathy with
his excellences and impatient of his defects, and his influence has
been regarded as a monstrous barrier restraining all deep and
natural emotion until swept away by the torrent of the romantic
revival. He has figured as one who left the free air of heaven
for the atmosphere of the coffeehouse, as the first to introduce
a mechanical standard of poetry, owing its acceptance to the
prosaic tone of his day. Attention to the historic side of literature
has brought sounder views. It is urged that, far from making
nature give way to art, he shared the reaction, not confined to
England, against an artificial mode, and stood in a real sense for
a return to nature. Rather than having been the originator of
a movement, he represents its climax, as he carried to completion
a work already begun.
Pope's attitude was not one of revolt. His poetry did not
disgust on its first appearance by deserting accepted models.
## p. 67 (#91) ##############################################
Early Studies
67
His immediate success proves how closely he was in touch with
his contemporaries. In the directness and lucidity of his style, he
improved his inheritance from Waller, Denham and Dryden. In
the skill with which he elaborated the heroic couplet, he was in-
debted to these poets, above all to Dryden, as well as to the
translations of Sandys. In the striving after simplicity, in the
rejection of the extravagance of the so-called metaphysical poets,
he instinctively followed an existing movement, precisely as the
justness of thought and clarity of expression in Swift and Addison
had an immediate ancestry. But, in prose and poetry alike, the
qualities greatly admired in that period, and valuable in any,
were won at the cost of others whose loss must be deplored, and
poetry suffered most.
Alexander Pope was born in London, on 21 May 1688, of parents
past middle age. They were devout Roman catholics; their son's
adherence to this creed seems to have been prompted by filial
affection. The accident of belonging to a proscribed church
decided the course of his education. It is curious to reflect that,
displaying such affinity for polish and precision, he should have
missed a classical training. After brief schooling, he was taken
home to Binfield, in Windsor forest, where his father had settled
on retiring from his linendraper's business, and from about the
age of twelve was largely self-taught. He grew up undersized,
delicate and deformed, though we have testimony to the beauty
of his voice and the brilliance of his eye. The presence of a fiery
soul within this frail tenement was proved when, in an unliterary
home, amid the languor of sickness and the lack of mental dis-
cipline, he developed a poetic genius, not fitful and uneven but
inspired by a continual endeavour after the highest attainable in
the form and music of his verse. Pope's own account of these early
studies was:
When I had done with my priests, I took to reading by myself, for which
I had a very great eagerness and enthusiasm, especially for poetry: and in a
few years I had dipped into a great number of the English, French, Italian,
Latin and Greek poets. This I did without any design but that of pleasing
myself: and got the languages by hunting after the stories in the several
poets I read1.
Of his knowledge of Italian, there is little trace. His Greek was,
certainly, not strong. In spite of some acquaintance with French
literature, he never seems to have had any real familiarity with the
language. With regard to scholarship, he was doubtless ‘shady
a
.
1 Spence's Anecdotes, ed. Singer, S. W. , 1820, p. 193.
5-2
## p. 68 (#92) ##############################################
68
Pope
1
>
in Latin’; but he was profoundly affected by the Roman poets,
with whose style and ways of thought he showed a remarkable
affinity. We everywhere feel the influence of the finish, dignity
and sonorousness of Latin poetry.
Of his own countrymen, Waller, Spenser and Dryden were his
favourites. While yet a child, he began to ‘lisp in numbers. ' At
his first school, he was punished for lampooning his master; at the
next, he tacked together speeches from Ogilby's Iliad to be acted
by his companions. Shortly after, as he told Spence, he began an
epic, Alcander Prince of Rhodes, and completed four books.
This he destroyed in mature life. We hear, also, of a tragedy on
St Geneviève. The satirical lines on the author of Successio (1712)
were said by Pope to have been written at fourteen; but the
earliest poem that has a place in his works is the Ode on Solitude,
sent to Henry Cromwell in a letter of 1709, and there stated to
have been composed when the author was not yet twelve; the
lines, however, were retouched after transcription and further
improved before their publication in 1735. The boy soon recog-
nised the weakness of his own efforts and turned to translation.
He was already familiar with attempts by others. In after years,
he still spoke with rapture of the pleasure he had received as
a boy from Ogilby's rendering of Homer. His own translation
of the first book of Statius's Thebais was professedly made ‘almost
in his childhood, but corrected before publication. He also tried
his hand on part of the Metamorphoses and began to submit
Chaucer to a similar process. His half-sister remarked of these
early years, 'I believe nobody ever studied so hard as my brother
did. He did nothing else but write and read. ' But Pope's literary
judgment was not based solely on books. At a susceptible age, he
formed a friendship with more than one man of mature years,
knowledge of the world and taste for letters. Among the earliest
of these was Sir William Trumbull, a retired diplomatist living near
Binfield Others were Wycherley, Henry Cromwell, a literary
man about town, and William Walsh, styled by Dryden the best
critic of our nation. Pope corresponded with these, sought their
advice and submitted his verses. His Pastorals went from hand
to hand and were complimented in flattering terms. Tonson
offered to publish them, and, after some delay, they appeared in
the sixth volume of his Miscellany, on 2 May 1709.
If we take Pope's own word, they had been composed when he
was sixteen. Parts, at least, had been written a year or two later,
and none assumed their final form until both numbers and language
## p. 69 (#93) ##############################################
Windsor Forest.
Messiah
69
had been assiduously polished. The paper is still extant, contain-
ing a list of passages drawn up by Pope, with which he was dis-
satisfied and alternatives appended for Walsh's choice. But the
pastoral was a dying form of poetry into which fresh blood could not
now be infused. Writing among country sights and sounds, Pope has,
at the utmost, two or three descriptive touches from his own obser-
vation. In his ironical criticism in The Guardian, Pope remarked
that Philips, in his Pastorals, gave ‘manifest proof of his knowledge
of books’; his own amply deserve this praise. He had gleaned,
not from Theocritus and Vergil alone, but from Spenser, Sidney,
Drummond, Milton, Waller, Dryden, Congreve, Walsh and Sannazaro.
The real merit of the Pastorals lay in the versification. The new
poet was clearly possessed of a quite exceptional metrical skill.
Windsor Forest (1713) belongs, in great part, to the period
of the Pastorals. It is no longer a purely literary exercise, but
an attempt to apply observation and reading to a larger theme.
The design, for which Pope was indebted to Denham's Cooper's
Hill, was to combine a description of the countryside and
field-sports with the historical and literary associations of the
district. He was induced to add the lines after I. 290 by Lord
Lansdowne (George Granville), who was anxious that he should
praise the peace of Utrecht. It must be confessed that Pope
is not strong in the appreciation of natural scenery, although
Wordsworth was pleased to allow that a passage or two in Windsor
Forest contained new images of external nature. Pope's treat-
ment is largely conventional, and the atmosphere is spoilt by one
of the worst faults of pseudo-classicism--the Mars-Bacchus-Apollo
element. The plumage of the dying pheasant may be over-elabo-
rated; still, it is distinctly pleasing to find a recognition that other
of God's creatures besides man have a right to enjoy themselves
on this earth. But, in his pastoral and sylvan efforts, Pope had
,
now clearly shown that, as a nature poet, he was not in advance
of his age. Thomson was yet to come.
The sacred eclogue Messiah was printed in The Spectator for
14 May 1712. In his attempt to pour the Messianic prophecies
of Isaiah into the mould of a Vergilian eclogue, Pope, in spite
of an undeniable impressiveness, lowered their majesty by artificial
epithet and paraphrase. It is curious to note how gradually the
false attitude came home to critics. Warton and Bowles use very
guarded language when suggesting that, in a few passages, Pope
had weakened the sublimity of Isaiah. It was Wordsworth who
cited the poem as an illustration of artificial poetic diction.
## p. 70 (#94) ##############################################
70
Pope
E
]
An Essay on Criticism, which appeared in 1711, was, apparently,
written in 1709, though Pope attempted afterwards to assign
its composition to an earlier date. It was natural that, being
studiously careful of his form, with the examples of Horace, Vida
and Boileau before him (not to mention Roscommon and Bucking-
hamshire), he should try to discuss the principles of his art. He
gave his poem, indeed, the title An Essay on Criticism; but it is
clear that he is addressing not so much the ingenuous reader as
the intending writer. He once said that he had digested all the
matter in prose before he began it in verse; but, according to
Jonathan Richardson, he often spoke of the Essay as an irregular
collection of thoughts, thrown together as they offered themselves,
as Horace's Art of Poetry was. ' And this would seem a true
description, for Pope was not a pioneer. He did not aim at leading
his generation along new ways, but at recalling them to paths
trodden by the ancients. Originality, even from the point of view
of his own days, is not to be expected from him. But, though
he inevitably insisted on truths which may now appear obvious,
his genius for conciseness and epigram has stamped many a truth
of this nature with the form that it must wear for all time. With
the Essay, Pope became famous.
Young Lord Petre, by snipping a lock of Miss Fermor's hair,
had caused ill-feeling between the families. Pope was invited by
his friend Caryll to allay this by taking the theme for a playful
poem. The Rape of the Lock, in its first form, was written within
a fortnight and published anonymously in Lintot's Miscellany, 1712.
For the genre, Pope was indebted to Boileau's Lutrin, as Boileau
had been to Tassoni's Secchia Rapita ; but, in its blending of
mock-heroic, satire and delicate fancy, this exquisite specimen
of filigree work, as Hazlitt called it, remains unmatched. Pope's
hand was never happier than in adding to the original sketch his
machinery of sylphs and gnomes. But his genius for touching
appears throughout. Nothing could better illustrate Pope's
methods of working than to turn to the earlier version of the six
lines beginning canto i 13, and to watch how vastly each one has
been improved. The parody of Sarpedon's speech in the fifth canto
was not introduced till the edition of 1717. In Germany, The Rape
gave rise to a long series of imitations.
Two poems, of uncertain date, appear first in the volume of
1717: Eloisa to Abelard and the Elegy to the Memory of an
Unfortunate Lady. In these, Pope made a sustained attempt
to present pathos and passion. To modern taste, his emotion is
## p. 71 (#95) ##############################################
71
Eloisa to Abelard. Epistles
too rhetorical. The lady's personality and fate are vague. Pope's
puzzling note darkened the mystery. Research has shown that,
while the death and details were imaginary, his warm sympathy
for Mrs Weston was the basis on which the poem was built. But,
the gleaning of phrases, the dexterous piecing together of parts of a
poem, are hardly suited for the expression of deep and spontaneous
feeling. It is possible that a poet may brood for long over a cruel
bereavement and yet not destroy the impression of sincerity by the
elaborate treatment of his grief. Such genuine emotion, however,
as is embodied in Pope's poem seems hardly deep or definite
enough to give warmth to the whole. The feeling has been
fondled for a literary purpose.
The material for Eloisa was taken from John Hughes's trans-
lation of a French paraphrase of the Latin epistles that passed
under the names of Abelard and Eloisa. The motive is the
struggle in her heart between her human passion for Abelard and
her dedication to the service of God. In the background of the
poem, the convent of the Paraclete and its surroundings, there are
touches which anticipate the romantic feeling for natural scenery
and architecture. A writer of our own time can still say of the
poem, Ce n'est pas seulement une des expressions les plus fortes
de la passion qui aient été données, c'est la seule qui existe de
l'amour absolu? But it may be doubted whether, in Pope's fervid
tones, we are listening to the voice of nature and passion and not
rather to a piece of superb declamation.
Whatever exception may be taken to his attempts in the higher
sphere of passion, Pope's sense of friendship, and something
further which it is not easy to define, are expressed with singular
charm in his Epistles to Mr Jervas, to a Young Lady with the
works of Voiture and to the Same on her leaving the Town after
the Coronation. It is characteristic that the last two Epistles
were written, in the first instance, for Teresa Blount, and trans-
ferred afterwards to her younger sister Martha. At this time,
Pope seems to have been specially susceptible to female influence.
How much genuine feeling and how much conventional gallantry
made up his attitude to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, it might be
hard to determine. The most likely explanation of the bitterness
with which he assailed her in after years is to be found in her own
statement, that a declaration of passionate love provoked on her
side an immoderate fit of laughter. On the other hand, it was
1 Montégut, Emile, 'Heures de Lecture d'un Critique : Pope,' Revue des deux Mondes,
15 March 1888.
## p. 72 (#96) ##############################################
72
Pope
.
his fondness of thirty years for Martha Blount, at times misunder-
stood, that helped him through the long disease of his life.
Pope's literary activity in this first stretch of his career was
singularly varied. Any dramatic work was confined to a share
in Gay and Arbuthnot's Three Hours after Marriage. His Ode
for Music on Saint Cecilia's Day marks the absence of the lyrical
gift. His other attempts to sing were of the slightest ; but there
is enough variety in the rest to show the directions in which he
could turn his extraordinary technical skill. We miss any indi-
cation of what was to be the main subject of his matured art.
And, just when we might have expected him to plan a great
original work, he binds himself to years of translation, and, this
task over, we find him in a new field. Pope has been described ,
at this stage, as a potential romanticist, and we are conscious,
in more than one of his poems, of feelings that faded away and
a promise that was never fulfilled. Something must be allowed
to the spirit of the times, something to his long term of hard
labour on his Homer, something to advancing years. For Pope
aged early: to his gayer youth succeeded a more or less invalid
middle age, which might itself account for a change of tone and
a restriction in his choice of subject. The psychology of poetic
creation is a perilous topic; but it would seem that his fervour
was frequently kindled, not so much by the theme itself as by the
consciousness of literary effort in treating it; that, in short, his in-
spiration grew in the course of composition.
The main features of
his style were now formed. Change of taste has done its worst with
them; but it is unfair to construct an idea of the essential from the
accidents of bis art. At his best, he is signally direct, free from
artificial balance, otiose epithets and pseudo-classical periphrasis.
The nature of many of his winged words is responsible for the
belief that Pope's qualities were hard and prosaic. But the exact
matching of thought with speech, making any other mode of expres-
sion inconceivable, is not less remarkable in passages where the
idea is more poetical. Pope did not restrict himself to conversa-
tional language: his style is exceptionally rich in apt reminiscences
of other writers. But his acquaintance with men of the world, at
a time when literature held little aloof from everyday life made him
sensitively aware what his audience demanded. In this respect, the
age of Anne may be called Augustan. Its chief men wrote primarily
for the few. Pope has been compared to Horace, from whom he
widely differs in much else. But the curiosa felicitas of both was
1 Montégut, Emilo, op. cit.
## p. 73 (#97) ##############################################
Pope's Workmanship and Style 73
connected with the same instinct. One of the conditions of Pope's
correctness was that no extravagance or solecism should offend
his reader's taste. His early devotion to books has been described.
'I had rather,' he confided to Spence, ‘be employed in reading
than in the most agreeable conversation'; and, in all that he read,
his tenacious memory and sense for apt expression never slumbered.
Individual as his style remains, its fabric is many a time woven
with threads drawn from another's web. But he was no plagiarist.
The form of words is borrowed or adapted to fit a thought of his
own that already asked for utterance. We are reminded again
and again of the advantage to which he had studied Milton and
Waller and Dryden, and many another predecessor, besides taking
hints from contemporaries. Many passages of this kind were noted
by Warton and Wakefield and later editors, and a closer search will
bring more to light. Pope is not one of those writers who are
never at a loss for a word, still less for ten. His style rests on his
oriental patience in elaborating his art. 'I corrected,' he observes
in his preface of 1717, 'because it was as pleasant to me to correct
as to write,' and a study of their gradual growth proves that, in
many of his lines, the finest touches are due to second intentions.
Thus
And strike to dust th’ imperial tow'rs of Troy1
owes its full effectiveness to an afterthought, and the inevitable
couplet that tells of fit instruments of illº is an improvement on an
earlier attempt. Autographs, proof-sheets and revised editions all
attest his passion for retouching. 'I will make my enemy do me
a kindness when he meant an injury,' he writes to Caryll, “and so
serve instead of a friend'; and he blotted lines that Dennis had
condemned. In minute care of workmanship, he has not been out-
done by Tennyson. The sense of the supreme importance of polish
was a legacy from Augustan Rome. The endeavour for compactness
makes Pope, at times, ungrammatical or obscure. Austin Dobson
has characterised his age:
When Phoebus touch'd the Poet's trembling ear
With one supreme commandment, Be thou Clear 3.
But, in An Essay on Criticism, where there is need above all to
be lucid, Pope, more than once, sins by ambiguity, as, again, in An
Essay on Man. The metrical principles which he followed from
an early period were expounded in a letter to Cromwell. He
1 The Rape of the Lock, canto III, 1. 174.
3 Ibid. 11. 125–6.
: A Dialogue to the memory of Mr Alexander Pope; Collected Poems, 1897, p. 304.
## p. 74 (#98) ##############################################
74
Pope
excepts against hiatus, the use of expletives, monosyllabic lines-
unless very artfully managed-the repetition of the same rimes
within four or six lines and the too frequent use of alexandrines;
and recommends that the same pause in the verse should not be
continued for more than three lines in succession.
Pope has been charged with monotony in his management of
the heroic couplet. The surprising thing is that he should have
achieved so much variety. He was extraordinarily dexterous in
varying the music of his verse within the limits he had set himself.
The effect is due to change in pause and beat, a judicious attention
to the number of syllables in his words, with an unobtrusive
employment of every degree of alliteration and of what may be
called the opposite of alliteration, as in
Eyes the calm sunset of thy various day! .
The charge that, with Pope, the couplet is almost exclusively the
unit of composition requires qualification. At his best, we find
him working with the larger unit of the paragraph. As the ideas
of a prose-writer using short independent sentences are not neces-
sarily less consecutive than those developed in lengthy periods,
so Pope, by avoiding enjambement, is not compelled to express a
series of disconnected thoughts. A study of his more careful
paragraphs shows, too, with what art he extended alliteration
over the boundaries of the couplet and studied the music of the
larger division. The most serious fault which can be detected is
that his ear for rime was not so delicate as his sense of rhythm,
When all allowance has been made for the pronunciation of his
day, there still remain a large number of unsatisfactory rimes.
Weakness, too, is shown in the repetition of the same set of rimes
after too short an interval, and the employment of others too close
in sound to those immediately preceding.
Before the end of the period whose productions are contained
in the Works of 1717, he had already published the first instalment
of his most laborious enterprise. He once observed that, had he
not undertaken his translation of the Iliad, he would certainly
have written an epic poem. Towards the close of his life, he formed
a plan for one on Brutus of Troy; but Conington has well remarked
that Pope's sympathy with epic grandeur was the sympathy of art,
not of kindred inspiration. So far back as 9 April 1708, we find
Trumbull, in a letter to Pope, acknowledging the receipt of the
Sarpedon episode in the Iliad, afterwards published in Tonson's
Miscellany, and renewing a request that he would translate 'that
Epistle to Robert Earl of Oxford, and Earl Mortimer, 1. 38.
6
1
## p. 75 (#99) ##############################################
Pope's Homer
75
6
incomparable poet' and 'make him speak good English. ' In his
preface to the Iliad, while mentioning the encouragement received
from Steele, Swift, Garth, Congreve, Rowe and Parnell, Pope states
that Addison was the first whose advice determined bim to under-
take this task.
By his own confession, it was gain as much as glory that
'winged his flight. ' His father's fortune was not large. Catholics
were double-taxed. His own health required indulgence. In short,
without exactly writing for money, he went where money was.
The work was to be published by subscription, and the eagerness
of his friends secured a long list of names. Yet the difficulties in
his path might have appalled a less stout heart. To engage one's
activity for a long way ahead would seem to demand a robuster
constitution than he possessed. Further, Pope had no sound know-
ledge of Greek. But he set resolutely to work. The linguistic diffi-
culties were surmounted by a comparison of previous translators,
Latin, English and French. Parnell wrote An Essay on the Life,
Writings and Learning of Homer (in vol. I of the Miscellany), while,
in the compilation of the notes from Eustathius and other sources,
help was given by Parnell, Broome and Jortin. The first four
volumes appeared in 1715, 1716, 1717, 1718, and the last two, with a
dedication to Congreve, in 1720. The harvest-home was sung by Gay
in Mr Pope's Welcome from Greece. Tickell, a member of Addison's
circle, published a translation of the first Iliad on the same day as
Pope's first volume. It was supposed, in some quarters, that Addison
had inspired it as a rival venture and even had a principal hand in
the performance. Pope, naturally, was suspicious and the incident
was one cause of his estrangement from Addison. As a translation
in the narrower sense, his rendering has very obvious shortcomings.
Of this, no proof was needed. Wakefield, in his edition (1795), has
shown in detail how largely Pope's inaccuracy was due to his having
taken the sense of the text of Homer from Chapman, Hobbes, Ogilby,
Dacier and others. Not only did he often miss the meaning of the
original ; but he followed his predecessors in additions which had
no warrant in the Greek. All this, however, in a sense, is beside
the mark. Pope, for all his defects in scholarship, approached
Homer with reverence and confessed himself incapable of doing
justice to him. But he was right when he asserted that it ought
to be the endeavour of anyone who translates Homer "above all
things to keep alive that spirit and fire which makes his chief
character. ' Others have produced translations; but Pope's work
is a poem. The style and taste of his time more closely suited the
a
## p. 76 (#100) #############################################
76
Pope
character of Latin poetryHe has artificial turns which are as
far removed as can be from the directness of his original; but the
reader who cannot, or will not, view these accidents in their true
proportion, and who is impervious to the beauty of the work, must,
at the same time, be impervious to much in Homer.
It has been said that Pope's Iliad was the cause of the vicious
poetic style prevalent in the latter part of the eighteenth century.
A certain periphrastic pomp was found easy of imitation, and
became a marked feature in the verse of men who were without
a touch of his poetic power. The popularity of his Iliad has
lasted for long; but there are signs that the attraction it exercised
on several generations is waning. A critic who has shown unsur-
passed insight and sympathy in his estimate of Pope wrote, in
1881, 'No one will venture to say Pope's Iliad has gone, or is
likely to go, out of fashion ? ' One would be glad to feel that this
judgment and forecast were not unduly optimistic.
Shortly after the long labour of the Iliad was over, Pope was
engaged in two fresh enterprises. The translation of the Odyssey
was shared with two Cambridge men, Elijah Fenton and William
Broome, to whom half the books were allotted, Fenton taking I, IV,
XIX and xx,and his colleague II, VI, VIII, XI, XII, XVI, XVIII and XXIII,
while Pope translated the rest and assumed, in addition, the office of
revision. The first three volumes were published in 1725, and the
remaining two in the next year. Pope's general supervision of the
translation, and the skill with which his subordinates assumed his
style, prevented any obvious contrast between the parts. The cor-
respondence between Pope, Broome and Fenton throws light on one
of the least honourable incidents in Pope's career. He received
by subscription £4500, out of which he allowed Broome £570 and
Fenton £200. He was entitled to demand the lion's share; but, after
vainly endeavouring to suppress the details of the collaboration,
he induced Broome to allow a statement to appear under his name
which led the public to suppose the chief partner to be responsible
for all but five books. The weariness that had come over Pope
told on his execution, nor was the Odyssey so congenial a subject
to him. He had been at his best in the speeches of the Niad and
groaned most heavily over the homely scenes in Ithaca.
a
1 In 1740, J. and P. Knapton brought out in two volumes, Selecta Poemata Italorum
Qui Latine Scripserunt. Accurante A. Pope, based on an anonymous selection by
Atterbury (1684). There are several traces in Pope's works of his indebtedness to
renascence Latin verse.
2 Courthope, W. J. , The Works of Alexander Pope, vol. I, p. 35.
## p. 77 (#101) #############################################
Pope's Shakespeare.
Friends and Foes 77
Pope's treatment of his coadjutors figured prominently hence-
forward in the personalities of his opponents. But the Odyssey
was also the occasion of his friendship with Joseph Spence, through
the latter's Essay on Pope's Odyssey (1726–7). During this time,
Pope had been engaged on his edition of Shakespeare, undertaken
at Tonson's invitation and published in March 1725. His main
disqualifications are patent. He had no intimate knowledge of
the Elizabethan period and lacked some of the qualities-above
all the patience-requisite for a thorough editing of the text.
But a man of his genius could hardly devote himself to a literary
subject without leaving some result. “Proofs of the time and toil he
spent upon the text can be found on nearly every page 1. His
preface has, at least, the merit of a sincere recognition of Shake-
speare's greatness. The task of pointing out the errors in Pope's
edition was undertaken by Lewis Theobald, a man memorable for
his high deserts among Shakespearean critics? This was the offence
that gained him the laurel in The Dunciad. Pope's labours as
translator and commentator left him little leisure for original verse.
Among the shorter pieces of this period is the Epistle to Robert Earl
of Oxford, and Earl Mortimer (1721), dedicating Parnell's Poems
to him. Pope excels all other men, even Dryden, in the compli-
ments he pays his friends; and, for variety of music and dignity of
style, this Epistle is unsurpassed. Admirable, too, is the skill
with which Harley's indolence is elevated to the rank of a rare
virtue. Whatever may be the historical verdict on Harley as
a politician, Pope has cast an unfading halo about the memory
of
the man.
Thanks to Homer, Pope had thriven; he had settled in his
Twickenham villa in 1719 and associated on equal terms with the
first men of his day. But, though he had a heart capable of strong
affection and generosity, he was apt to brood over injuries real
and imaginary, and employ to the full his 'proper power to hurt. '
He had provoked Dennis, in An Essay on Criticism, and avenged
himself on Dennis's Reflections by The Narrative of Dr Robert
Norris (1713), ostensibly in reply to the criticisms on Cato.
Addison's dissociation of himself from this attack, probably, con-
tributed to the estrangement between them. Two years later, Pope,
who sent several papers to The Guardian, resented a eulogy there
of Ambrose Philips's Pastorals, and wrote a paper (15 April 1713)
1
1 Cf. ante, vol. v, p. 269; and see Lounsbury, T. R. , The first editors of Shake.
speare, p. 100.
? Cf. ante, vol. v, pp. 270—1.
## p. 78 (#102) #############################################
78
Pope
contrasting his own Pastorals with Philips's and giving the pre-
ference to the latter. In 1716, he retorted on Curll for having
published Court Poems, ascribing them to the laudible translator
of Homer,' by A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Bar-
barous Revenge by Poison on the Body of Edmund Curll. Towards
the end of queen Anne's reign, Pope, Swift, Gay, Parnell and others
had been in the habit of meeting at Arbuthnot's rooms in St James's
palace. Nights with these gatherings had closed Harley's toilsome
days. A literary scheme with which this informal club dallied
was a satire on various forms of pedantry in the person of an
imaginary Martinus Scriblerus 1. In 1726, Swift had revisited
England after twelve years' absence, and stayed for part of his
time at Twickenham, Gay being a fellow guest. He repeated the
visit in the following year. In June 1727, appeared the first two
volumes of Miscellanies. The preface was signed jointly by Swift
and Pope. Miscellanies, the last volume, 1728, contained the
character of Addison which had first appeared in Cytherea: or
poems upon Love and Intrigue, 1723, and now received new
additions. A fragment of a Satire corresponds to lines 151—214
of the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, though, in its latest form, quite
half the lines have undergone change. But the exercise in the
gentle art' which made most stir was the opening piece of the
volume, Pope's Martinus Scriblerus NEPI BAOOTE: or the
Art of Sinking in Poetry. In this, the Bathos or Profund, the
Natural Taste of Man and in particular the present age' was
discussed and illustrated by quotations from Blackmore (who had
rebuked Pope for an unseemly parody of the first Psalm), Ambrose
Philips, Theobald, Dennis, Welsted, Thomas Cooke and others.
In chapter vi, the several kinds of geniuses in the ‘Profund' are
classified as ostriches, parrots, porpoises and so forth, and three
or four sets of initials are given in each class. Pope's intention,
apparently, was to draw down attacks from the offended authors
so that he might have a pretext for the publication of The Dunciad,
which he was now preparing to bring out. In the preface to the
1728 edition of this work, the reader is told that
every week for these last two months past the town has been persecuted with
pamphlets, advertisements, and weekly essays, not only against the wit and
writings, but against the character and person of Mr Pope.
But it has been shown that, when the provocation is considered,
the attacks made upon Pope were extremely few, and did not
include a single pamphlet, while four of them, if not Pope's own
I Cf. post, chap. v.
? Lounsbury, u. s. p. 207.
## p. 79 (#103) #############################################
The Dunciad
79
handiwork, were inspired by him. It was evident, too, that the
composition of the poem had preceded the attacks. It seems to
have been on the stocks, in some form or other, for several years.
What determined its plan and hastened its completion was, un-
doubtedly, the pain given him by Theobald's Shakespeare Restored,
which must have been all the keener because he could not fail
to perceive the justice of the criticism. In the preface to the
1729 edition of The Dunciad, the dedication to Swift is said to
have been due to the fact that the latter had snatched the first
draft of the poem from the fire and urged the author to proceed
with it. Pope was certainly engaged on The Dunciad when Swift
was his guest, and the latter claimed some credit for the work
on the ground that his deafness had prevented conversation. But
it has never been shown that he had any actual share in the com-
position of the work. The story of its publication reveals one of
the most intricate series of manoeuvres in which Pope was ever
implicated. Evidently, he felt anxious at the thought of putting
before the public the whole mass of his personalities, and of ac-
knowledging them under his own name. The Dunciad appeared,
anonymously, in May 1728. It bore on the title ‘Dublin Printed,
London Re-printed for A. Dodd,' and was advertised as the second
edition. Its success was immediate, and several further issues
followed. Pope was emboldened to bring out a more elaborate
form in 1729. Names, with a very few exceptions, were now printed
in full, whereas, in the previous edition, initial and final letters,
or initial only, had been the rule. The dedicatory lines to Swift,
which had been purposely omitted, were restored and the poem
was garnished with ‘Notes Variorum and the Prolegomena of
Scriblerus. ' An elaborate piece of caution on Pope's part was to
assign the copyright to Lords Bathurst, Burlington and Oxford,
who afterwards assigned it to Lawton Gilliver. Its authorship
was not openly acknowledged till 1735. The main idea of The
Dunciad was taken from Mac Flecknoe, and, in emulating his
master's vigorous satire, Pope must have felt that he was put
upon his mettle. The Dunciad, even in its earlier form, is four
times the length of Mac Flecknoe, and, while Dryden's assault is
almost exclusively upon Shadwell, Pope, though aiming principally
at Theobald, attacked, at the same time, whole battalions of his
enemies. There are two sides to The Dunciad. Though Pope's
claim that the lash was lifted in the interests of all honest men
must be rejected, he was not merely indulging in an outburst of
personal malice. In places, especially in the book added later
## p. 80 (#104) #############################################
80
Pope
there is effective chastisement of literary vices, without an undue
admixture of the personal element. But his treating The Dunciad
like a large open grave into which fresh bodies of his victims
could be flung, has impaired the value of his general satire. The
tremendous energy with which he dealt damnation round the
land' has had a result which would have astounded himself,
Though our protests are challenged by the presence of some
names, such as Bentley and Defoe, yet, with regard to the bulk
of his victims, the reader is apt to feel even more than acqui-
escence in Pope's verdict.
accompanied by a few verse paraphrases of the Psalms, rendered
with polished simplicity, and are varied by allegories, among which
The First Vision of Mirza is justly celebrated for its tranquil,
lofty style.
The Spectator's last number appeared on 6 December 1712.
Both writers had cultivated to a surprising degree the art of
the Aâneur and knew how to turn innumerable and generally
unnoticed episodes of city life into charming sketches. Such
things as a sensation in a coffeehouse, a fencing-match, an argu-
ment in a bookshop, an old beggar, or a man who applauds with a
stick in a theatre gallery, are among their best studies of character'.
But, apparently, both editors had written themselves out. Addison,
at the instigation of his friends, set to work on Cato, the first four
acts of which had been written before the beginning of The Tatler,
perhaps as early as 1703. With many misgivings, he allowed the
tragedy to be produced at Drury lane on 14 April 1713. It was
a time of great political excitement; and, when so prominent a
public man as Addison produced a drama on Cato's last stand for
liberty, against the usurpation of Caesar, both parties turned the
situation against their opponents and applauded furiously. In any
event, the play was bound to have been a success. It pictures the
last of the Roman republicans, a statuesque outline magnanimous
and unmoved, surrounded by a treachery which is baffled by the
loyalty of his sons and Juba, accepting death rather than dishonour
and, in his last moments, taking thought for those around him.
The plot is twofold. Side by side with the study in public virtue
and high politics, a drama of the tender passion occupies the stage.
When Cato's son Marcius dies gallantly fighting against the traitor
Syphax, his brother wins the hand of Lucia, for which they had
a
i Nos. 185, 201, 483,
· Nos. 120, 121, 387, 489, 494, 495, 531, 543.
3 Nos. 207, 237, 391, 441.
- Nos. 186, 213, 219, 381, 483.
5 See respectively non. 403 and 481, 436, 438, 376, 235.
9
## p. 64 (#88) ##############################################
64
Steele and Addison
both been honourable rivals, and Juba, the once rejected suitor of
Marcia, Cato's daughter, romantically rescues her from the clutches
of Sempronius in disguise and finds that she has loved him all the
time. Thus, in the consecrated form of a Roman tragedy, the public
enjoyed that grandiose, if unsubstantial, projection of character
which they admired in Milton, together with the sentimental
chivalry of a French romance. To modern taste, the diction is
hopelessly declamatory, and the plot full of absurdities. But the
ordinary reader of the eighteenth century would almost regard
such artificiality as inevitable in a play which has strictly observed
the unities, contains a 'reversal of intention' and a 'recognition”
and abounds in crisp and quotable epigrams.
Meanwhile, Steele plunged into politics and, after much
pamphleteering, was expelled from the House of Commons for
uttering seditious libels. In 1714, he returned to literature and
started several periodicals, especially The Guardian, to which
Addison contributed fifty-one papers; and, in 1722, he produced
his last complete comedy, The Conscious Lovers. Though the plot
is largely borrowed from Terence's Andria and, where original,
abounds in more glaring improbabilities than his earlier work, the
play is remarkable because it resumes in brief all Steele's best
ideas on life and character. We have the sketch of servants whose
natural freshness is being gradually tainted by the corrupt and
contagious air of lackeydom? ; we have satire on marriages of
convenience, duelling and the chicanery of the law; a glance at
the opposition between the hereditary gentry and the rising
commercial class ; while, in Bevil junior, Steele portrays his ideal
of a gentleman, chivalrous and honourable to women, considerate
to men, respectful to his father and self-controlled amid the riotous
pleasures of the capital.
Steele and Addison produced other works separately. But,
when they ceased to collaborate in The Spectator, which was
subsequently continued by one of their circle, both became
authors of secondary importance. Their task was already done.
The peculiar circumstances of their lives gave them an unrivalled
opportunity of observing the movement of their time. Thanks
to a certain conventionality of intellect, coupled with amazing
1 The repetétela and ávarrópions of Aristotle; see Politics, ed. Butcher, 8. H. , 3rd
ed. 1902.
2 Besides the scenes in which Tom and Phillis appear, see the episode of the footboy
newly arrived in London, act v, sc. 2.
8 See bibliography.
## p. 65 (#89) ##############################################
Steele, Addison and the Essay
65
cleverness, they became the heart of this movement, and made it
literature. In this sense, they collaborated with their age. As a
comparison between the two writers is almost inevitable, it may
be said, in conclusion, that Steele was the more original and
Addison the more effective. Steele conceived the periodical essay,
but never perfected it; he accidentally discovered the short story
and verged upon the domestic novel, without substantially in-
fluencing the development of either genre. This ineffectiveness
was partly due to his volatile nature and somewhat unstable life,
but it was also largely due to the presence of Addison. That
successful and self-contained mentor seems to have unconsciously
restrained Steele's initiative. But, while he curbed his companion's
talents, he displayed the utmost efficiency in the use of his own
and, without any deep fund of ideas or sympathy, raised Steele’s
conception of an essay to a degree of perfection never since
surpassed. The Londoners of queen Anne's reign chiefly valued
The Spectator for Addison's humorous papers and religious dis-
sertations. The modern student most admires its accuracy and
penetration, and the true and long-enduring picture which it gives
of middle class culture and character.
E. L. IX.
CH, II.
5
## p. 66 (#90) ##############################################
CHAPTER III
POPE
The great writer of whom this chapter treats was a man of real
poetic genius, the growth and direction of which were powerfully
affected by his physical constitution, his circumstances and the
character of the age. None of his achievements belong to the
very highest forms of poetry. Where he excelled, his pre-eminence
is beyond dispute; yet his deficiency in qualities more prized by
a later generation has imperilled his very right to be regarded as
a poet. On certain points, all are practically agreed. Pope is
a memorable example of a conscious literary artist, the type in
our country of the classical spirit; rarely has a poet shown
himself a truer or more delicate representative of his own time.
Even did his work no longer appeal to us by its enduring
merit, he must escape neglect because of his part in England's
literary development.
Pope's true position has not always been recognised. He has
been viewed from the standpoint of periods out of sympathy with
his excellences and impatient of his defects, and his influence has
been regarded as a monstrous barrier restraining all deep and
natural emotion until swept away by the torrent of the romantic
revival. He has figured as one who left the free air of heaven
for the atmosphere of the coffeehouse, as the first to introduce
a mechanical standard of poetry, owing its acceptance to the
prosaic tone of his day. Attention to the historic side of literature
has brought sounder views. It is urged that, far from making
nature give way to art, he shared the reaction, not confined to
England, against an artificial mode, and stood in a real sense for
a return to nature. Rather than having been the originator of
a movement, he represents its climax, as he carried to completion
a work already begun.
Pope's attitude was not one of revolt. His poetry did not
disgust on its first appearance by deserting accepted models.
## p. 67 (#91) ##############################################
Early Studies
67
His immediate success proves how closely he was in touch with
his contemporaries. In the directness and lucidity of his style, he
improved his inheritance from Waller, Denham and Dryden. In
the skill with which he elaborated the heroic couplet, he was in-
debted to these poets, above all to Dryden, as well as to the
translations of Sandys. In the striving after simplicity, in the
rejection of the extravagance of the so-called metaphysical poets,
he instinctively followed an existing movement, precisely as the
justness of thought and clarity of expression in Swift and Addison
had an immediate ancestry. But, in prose and poetry alike, the
qualities greatly admired in that period, and valuable in any,
were won at the cost of others whose loss must be deplored, and
poetry suffered most.
Alexander Pope was born in London, on 21 May 1688, of parents
past middle age. They were devout Roman catholics; their son's
adherence to this creed seems to have been prompted by filial
affection. The accident of belonging to a proscribed church
decided the course of his education. It is curious to reflect that,
displaying such affinity for polish and precision, he should have
missed a classical training. After brief schooling, he was taken
home to Binfield, in Windsor forest, where his father had settled
on retiring from his linendraper's business, and from about the
age of twelve was largely self-taught. He grew up undersized,
delicate and deformed, though we have testimony to the beauty
of his voice and the brilliance of his eye. The presence of a fiery
soul within this frail tenement was proved when, in an unliterary
home, amid the languor of sickness and the lack of mental dis-
cipline, he developed a poetic genius, not fitful and uneven but
inspired by a continual endeavour after the highest attainable in
the form and music of his verse. Pope's own account of these early
studies was:
When I had done with my priests, I took to reading by myself, for which
I had a very great eagerness and enthusiasm, especially for poetry: and in a
few years I had dipped into a great number of the English, French, Italian,
Latin and Greek poets. This I did without any design but that of pleasing
myself: and got the languages by hunting after the stories in the several
poets I read1.
Of his knowledge of Italian, there is little trace. His Greek was,
certainly, not strong. In spite of some acquaintance with French
literature, he never seems to have had any real familiarity with the
language. With regard to scholarship, he was doubtless ‘shady
a
.
1 Spence's Anecdotes, ed. Singer, S. W. , 1820, p. 193.
5-2
## p. 68 (#92) ##############################################
68
Pope
1
>
in Latin’; but he was profoundly affected by the Roman poets,
with whose style and ways of thought he showed a remarkable
affinity. We everywhere feel the influence of the finish, dignity
and sonorousness of Latin poetry.
Of his own countrymen, Waller, Spenser and Dryden were his
favourites. While yet a child, he began to ‘lisp in numbers. ' At
his first school, he was punished for lampooning his master; at the
next, he tacked together speeches from Ogilby's Iliad to be acted
by his companions. Shortly after, as he told Spence, he began an
epic, Alcander Prince of Rhodes, and completed four books.
This he destroyed in mature life. We hear, also, of a tragedy on
St Geneviève. The satirical lines on the author of Successio (1712)
were said by Pope to have been written at fourteen; but the
earliest poem that has a place in his works is the Ode on Solitude,
sent to Henry Cromwell in a letter of 1709, and there stated to
have been composed when the author was not yet twelve; the
lines, however, were retouched after transcription and further
improved before their publication in 1735. The boy soon recog-
nised the weakness of his own efforts and turned to translation.
He was already familiar with attempts by others. In after years,
he still spoke with rapture of the pleasure he had received as
a boy from Ogilby's rendering of Homer. His own translation
of the first book of Statius's Thebais was professedly made ‘almost
in his childhood, but corrected before publication. He also tried
his hand on part of the Metamorphoses and began to submit
Chaucer to a similar process. His half-sister remarked of these
early years, 'I believe nobody ever studied so hard as my brother
did. He did nothing else but write and read. ' But Pope's literary
judgment was not based solely on books. At a susceptible age, he
formed a friendship with more than one man of mature years,
knowledge of the world and taste for letters. Among the earliest
of these was Sir William Trumbull, a retired diplomatist living near
Binfield Others were Wycherley, Henry Cromwell, a literary
man about town, and William Walsh, styled by Dryden the best
critic of our nation. Pope corresponded with these, sought their
advice and submitted his verses. His Pastorals went from hand
to hand and were complimented in flattering terms. Tonson
offered to publish them, and, after some delay, they appeared in
the sixth volume of his Miscellany, on 2 May 1709.
If we take Pope's own word, they had been composed when he
was sixteen. Parts, at least, had been written a year or two later,
and none assumed their final form until both numbers and language
## p. 69 (#93) ##############################################
Windsor Forest.
Messiah
69
had been assiduously polished. The paper is still extant, contain-
ing a list of passages drawn up by Pope, with which he was dis-
satisfied and alternatives appended for Walsh's choice. But the
pastoral was a dying form of poetry into which fresh blood could not
now be infused. Writing among country sights and sounds, Pope has,
at the utmost, two or three descriptive touches from his own obser-
vation. In his ironical criticism in The Guardian, Pope remarked
that Philips, in his Pastorals, gave ‘manifest proof of his knowledge
of books’; his own amply deserve this praise. He had gleaned,
not from Theocritus and Vergil alone, but from Spenser, Sidney,
Drummond, Milton, Waller, Dryden, Congreve, Walsh and Sannazaro.
The real merit of the Pastorals lay in the versification. The new
poet was clearly possessed of a quite exceptional metrical skill.
Windsor Forest (1713) belongs, in great part, to the period
of the Pastorals. It is no longer a purely literary exercise, but
an attempt to apply observation and reading to a larger theme.
The design, for which Pope was indebted to Denham's Cooper's
Hill, was to combine a description of the countryside and
field-sports with the historical and literary associations of the
district. He was induced to add the lines after I. 290 by Lord
Lansdowne (George Granville), who was anxious that he should
praise the peace of Utrecht. It must be confessed that Pope
is not strong in the appreciation of natural scenery, although
Wordsworth was pleased to allow that a passage or two in Windsor
Forest contained new images of external nature. Pope's treat-
ment is largely conventional, and the atmosphere is spoilt by one
of the worst faults of pseudo-classicism--the Mars-Bacchus-Apollo
element. The plumage of the dying pheasant may be over-elabo-
rated; still, it is distinctly pleasing to find a recognition that other
of God's creatures besides man have a right to enjoy themselves
on this earth. But, in his pastoral and sylvan efforts, Pope had
,
now clearly shown that, as a nature poet, he was not in advance
of his age. Thomson was yet to come.
The sacred eclogue Messiah was printed in The Spectator for
14 May 1712. In his attempt to pour the Messianic prophecies
of Isaiah into the mould of a Vergilian eclogue, Pope, in spite
of an undeniable impressiveness, lowered their majesty by artificial
epithet and paraphrase. It is curious to note how gradually the
false attitude came home to critics. Warton and Bowles use very
guarded language when suggesting that, in a few passages, Pope
had weakened the sublimity of Isaiah. It was Wordsworth who
cited the poem as an illustration of artificial poetic diction.
## p. 70 (#94) ##############################################
70
Pope
E
]
An Essay on Criticism, which appeared in 1711, was, apparently,
written in 1709, though Pope attempted afterwards to assign
its composition to an earlier date. It was natural that, being
studiously careful of his form, with the examples of Horace, Vida
and Boileau before him (not to mention Roscommon and Bucking-
hamshire), he should try to discuss the principles of his art. He
gave his poem, indeed, the title An Essay on Criticism; but it is
clear that he is addressing not so much the ingenuous reader as
the intending writer. He once said that he had digested all the
matter in prose before he began it in verse; but, according to
Jonathan Richardson, he often spoke of the Essay as an irregular
collection of thoughts, thrown together as they offered themselves,
as Horace's Art of Poetry was. ' And this would seem a true
description, for Pope was not a pioneer. He did not aim at leading
his generation along new ways, but at recalling them to paths
trodden by the ancients. Originality, even from the point of view
of his own days, is not to be expected from him. But, though
he inevitably insisted on truths which may now appear obvious,
his genius for conciseness and epigram has stamped many a truth
of this nature with the form that it must wear for all time. With
the Essay, Pope became famous.
Young Lord Petre, by snipping a lock of Miss Fermor's hair,
had caused ill-feeling between the families. Pope was invited by
his friend Caryll to allay this by taking the theme for a playful
poem. The Rape of the Lock, in its first form, was written within
a fortnight and published anonymously in Lintot's Miscellany, 1712.
For the genre, Pope was indebted to Boileau's Lutrin, as Boileau
had been to Tassoni's Secchia Rapita ; but, in its blending of
mock-heroic, satire and delicate fancy, this exquisite specimen
of filigree work, as Hazlitt called it, remains unmatched. Pope's
hand was never happier than in adding to the original sketch his
machinery of sylphs and gnomes. But his genius for touching
appears throughout. Nothing could better illustrate Pope's
methods of working than to turn to the earlier version of the six
lines beginning canto i 13, and to watch how vastly each one has
been improved. The parody of Sarpedon's speech in the fifth canto
was not introduced till the edition of 1717. In Germany, The Rape
gave rise to a long series of imitations.
Two poems, of uncertain date, appear first in the volume of
1717: Eloisa to Abelard and the Elegy to the Memory of an
Unfortunate Lady. In these, Pope made a sustained attempt
to present pathos and passion. To modern taste, his emotion is
## p. 71 (#95) ##############################################
71
Eloisa to Abelard. Epistles
too rhetorical. The lady's personality and fate are vague. Pope's
puzzling note darkened the mystery. Research has shown that,
while the death and details were imaginary, his warm sympathy
for Mrs Weston was the basis on which the poem was built. But,
the gleaning of phrases, the dexterous piecing together of parts of a
poem, are hardly suited for the expression of deep and spontaneous
feeling. It is possible that a poet may brood for long over a cruel
bereavement and yet not destroy the impression of sincerity by the
elaborate treatment of his grief. Such genuine emotion, however,
as is embodied in Pope's poem seems hardly deep or definite
enough to give warmth to the whole. The feeling has been
fondled for a literary purpose.
The material for Eloisa was taken from John Hughes's trans-
lation of a French paraphrase of the Latin epistles that passed
under the names of Abelard and Eloisa. The motive is the
struggle in her heart between her human passion for Abelard and
her dedication to the service of God. In the background of the
poem, the convent of the Paraclete and its surroundings, there are
touches which anticipate the romantic feeling for natural scenery
and architecture. A writer of our own time can still say of the
poem, Ce n'est pas seulement une des expressions les plus fortes
de la passion qui aient été données, c'est la seule qui existe de
l'amour absolu? But it may be doubted whether, in Pope's fervid
tones, we are listening to the voice of nature and passion and not
rather to a piece of superb declamation.
Whatever exception may be taken to his attempts in the higher
sphere of passion, Pope's sense of friendship, and something
further which it is not easy to define, are expressed with singular
charm in his Epistles to Mr Jervas, to a Young Lady with the
works of Voiture and to the Same on her leaving the Town after
the Coronation. It is characteristic that the last two Epistles
were written, in the first instance, for Teresa Blount, and trans-
ferred afterwards to her younger sister Martha. At this time,
Pope seems to have been specially susceptible to female influence.
How much genuine feeling and how much conventional gallantry
made up his attitude to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, it might be
hard to determine. The most likely explanation of the bitterness
with which he assailed her in after years is to be found in her own
statement, that a declaration of passionate love provoked on her
side an immoderate fit of laughter. On the other hand, it was
1 Montégut, Emile, 'Heures de Lecture d'un Critique : Pope,' Revue des deux Mondes,
15 March 1888.
## p. 72 (#96) ##############################################
72
Pope
.
his fondness of thirty years for Martha Blount, at times misunder-
stood, that helped him through the long disease of his life.
Pope's literary activity in this first stretch of his career was
singularly varied. Any dramatic work was confined to a share
in Gay and Arbuthnot's Three Hours after Marriage. His Ode
for Music on Saint Cecilia's Day marks the absence of the lyrical
gift. His other attempts to sing were of the slightest ; but there
is enough variety in the rest to show the directions in which he
could turn his extraordinary technical skill. We miss any indi-
cation of what was to be the main subject of his matured art.
And, just when we might have expected him to plan a great
original work, he binds himself to years of translation, and, this
task over, we find him in a new field. Pope has been described ,
at this stage, as a potential romanticist, and we are conscious,
in more than one of his poems, of feelings that faded away and
a promise that was never fulfilled. Something must be allowed
to the spirit of the times, something to his long term of hard
labour on his Homer, something to advancing years. For Pope
aged early: to his gayer youth succeeded a more or less invalid
middle age, which might itself account for a change of tone and
a restriction in his choice of subject. The psychology of poetic
creation is a perilous topic; but it would seem that his fervour
was frequently kindled, not so much by the theme itself as by the
consciousness of literary effort in treating it; that, in short, his in-
spiration grew in the course of composition.
The main features of
his style were now formed. Change of taste has done its worst with
them; but it is unfair to construct an idea of the essential from the
accidents of bis art. At his best, he is signally direct, free from
artificial balance, otiose epithets and pseudo-classical periphrasis.
The nature of many of his winged words is responsible for the
belief that Pope's qualities were hard and prosaic. But the exact
matching of thought with speech, making any other mode of expres-
sion inconceivable, is not less remarkable in passages where the
idea is more poetical. Pope did not restrict himself to conversa-
tional language: his style is exceptionally rich in apt reminiscences
of other writers. But his acquaintance with men of the world, at
a time when literature held little aloof from everyday life made him
sensitively aware what his audience demanded. In this respect, the
age of Anne may be called Augustan. Its chief men wrote primarily
for the few. Pope has been compared to Horace, from whom he
widely differs in much else. But the curiosa felicitas of both was
1 Montégut, Emilo, op. cit.
## p. 73 (#97) ##############################################
Pope's Workmanship and Style 73
connected with the same instinct. One of the conditions of Pope's
correctness was that no extravagance or solecism should offend
his reader's taste. His early devotion to books has been described.
'I had rather,' he confided to Spence, ‘be employed in reading
than in the most agreeable conversation'; and, in all that he read,
his tenacious memory and sense for apt expression never slumbered.
Individual as his style remains, its fabric is many a time woven
with threads drawn from another's web. But he was no plagiarist.
The form of words is borrowed or adapted to fit a thought of his
own that already asked for utterance. We are reminded again
and again of the advantage to which he had studied Milton and
Waller and Dryden, and many another predecessor, besides taking
hints from contemporaries. Many passages of this kind were noted
by Warton and Wakefield and later editors, and a closer search will
bring more to light. Pope is not one of those writers who are
never at a loss for a word, still less for ten. His style rests on his
oriental patience in elaborating his art. 'I corrected,' he observes
in his preface of 1717, 'because it was as pleasant to me to correct
as to write,' and a study of their gradual growth proves that, in
many of his lines, the finest touches are due to second intentions.
Thus
And strike to dust th’ imperial tow'rs of Troy1
owes its full effectiveness to an afterthought, and the inevitable
couplet that tells of fit instruments of illº is an improvement on an
earlier attempt. Autographs, proof-sheets and revised editions all
attest his passion for retouching. 'I will make my enemy do me
a kindness when he meant an injury,' he writes to Caryll, “and so
serve instead of a friend'; and he blotted lines that Dennis had
condemned. In minute care of workmanship, he has not been out-
done by Tennyson. The sense of the supreme importance of polish
was a legacy from Augustan Rome. The endeavour for compactness
makes Pope, at times, ungrammatical or obscure. Austin Dobson
has characterised his age:
When Phoebus touch'd the Poet's trembling ear
With one supreme commandment, Be thou Clear 3.
But, in An Essay on Criticism, where there is need above all to
be lucid, Pope, more than once, sins by ambiguity, as, again, in An
Essay on Man. The metrical principles which he followed from
an early period were expounded in a letter to Cromwell. He
1 The Rape of the Lock, canto III, 1. 174.
3 Ibid. 11. 125–6.
: A Dialogue to the memory of Mr Alexander Pope; Collected Poems, 1897, p. 304.
## p. 74 (#98) ##############################################
74
Pope
excepts against hiatus, the use of expletives, monosyllabic lines-
unless very artfully managed-the repetition of the same rimes
within four or six lines and the too frequent use of alexandrines;
and recommends that the same pause in the verse should not be
continued for more than three lines in succession.
Pope has been charged with monotony in his management of
the heroic couplet. The surprising thing is that he should have
achieved so much variety. He was extraordinarily dexterous in
varying the music of his verse within the limits he had set himself.
The effect is due to change in pause and beat, a judicious attention
to the number of syllables in his words, with an unobtrusive
employment of every degree of alliteration and of what may be
called the opposite of alliteration, as in
Eyes the calm sunset of thy various day! .
The charge that, with Pope, the couplet is almost exclusively the
unit of composition requires qualification. At his best, we find
him working with the larger unit of the paragraph. As the ideas
of a prose-writer using short independent sentences are not neces-
sarily less consecutive than those developed in lengthy periods,
so Pope, by avoiding enjambement, is not compelled to express a
series of disconnected thoughts. A study of his more careful
paragraphs shows, too, with what art he extended alliteration
over the boundaries of the couplet and studied the music of the
larger division. The most serious fault which can be detected is
that his ear for rime was not so delicate as his sense of rhythm,
When all allowance has been made for the pronunciation of his
day, there still remain a large number of unsatisfactory rimes.
Weakness, too, is shown in the repetition of the same set of rimes
after too short an interval, and the employment of others too close
in sound to those immediately preceding.
Before the end of the period whose productions are contained
in the Works of 1717, he had already published the first instalment
of his most laborious enterprise. He once observed that, had he
not undertaken his translation of the Iliad, he would certainly
have written an epic poem. Towards the close of his life, he formed
a plan for one on Brutus of Troy; but Conington has well remarked
that Pope's sympathy with epic grandeur was the sympathy of art,
not of kindred inspiration. So far back as 9 April 1708, we find
Trumbull, in a letter to Pope, acknowledging the receipt of the
Sarpedon episode in the Iliad, afterwards published in Tonson's
Miscellany, and renewing a request that he would translate 'that
Epistle to Robert Earl of Oxford, and Earl Mortimer, 1. 38.
6
1
## p. 75 (#99) ##############################################
Pope's Homer
75
6
incomparable poet' and 'make him speak good English. ' In his
preface to the Iliad, while mentioning the encouragement received
from Steele, Swift, Garth, Congreve, Rowe and Parnell, Pope states
that Addison was the first whose advice determined bim to under-
take this task.
By his own confession, it was gain as much as glory that
'winged his flight. ' His father's fortune was not large. Catholics
were double-taxed. His own health required indulgence. In short,
without exactly writing for money, he went where money was.
The work was to be published by subscription, and the eagerness
of his friends secured a long list of names. Yet the difficulties in
his path might have appalled a less stout heart. To engage one's
activity for a long way ahead would seem to demand a robuster
constitution than he possessed. Further, Pope had no sound know-
ledge of Greek. But he set resolutely to work. The linguistic diffi-
culties were surmounted by a comparison of previous translators,
Latin, English and French. Parnell wrote An Essay on the Life,
Writings and Learning of Homer (in vol. I of the Miscellany), while,
in the compilation of the notes from Eustathius and other sources,
help was given by Parnell, Broome and Jortin. The first four
volumes appeared in 1715, 1716, 1717, 1718, and the last two, with a
dedication to Congreve, in 1720. The harvest-home was sung by Gay
in Mr Pope's Welcome from Greece. Tickell, a member of Addison's
circle, published a translation of the first Iliad on the same day as
Pope's first volume. It was supposed, in some quarters, that Addison
had inspired it as a rival venture and even had a principal hand in
the performance. Pope, naturally, was suspicious and the incident
was one cause of his estrangement from Addison. As a translation
in the narrower sense, his rendering has very obvious shortcomings.
Of this, no proof was needed. Wakefield, in his edition (1795), has
shown in detail how largely Pope's inaccuracy was due to his having
taken the sense of the text of Homer from Chapman, Hobbes, Ogilby,
Dacier and others. Not only did he often miss the meaning of the
original ; but he followed his predecessors in additions which had
no warrant in the Greek. All this, however, in a sense, is beside
the mark. Pope, for all his defects in scholarship, approached
Homer with reverence and confessed himself incapable of doing
justice to him. But he was right when he asserted that it ought
to be the endeavour of anyone who translates Homer "above all
things to keep alive that spirit and fire which makes his chief
character. ' Others have produced translations; but Pope's work
is a poem. The style and taste of his time more closely suited the
a
## p. 76 (#100) #############################################
76
Pope
character of Latin poetryHe has artificial turns which are as
far removed as can be from the directness of his original; but the
reader who cannot, or will not, view these accidents in their true
proportion, and who is impervious to the beauty of the work, must,
at the same time, be impervious to much in Homer.
It has been said that Pope's Iliad was the cause of the vicious
poetic style prevalent in the latter part of the eighteenth century.
A certain periphrastic pomp was found easy of imitation, and
became a marked feature in the verse of men who were without
a touch of his poetic power. The popularity of his Iliad has
lasted for long; but there are signs that the attraction it exercised
on several generations is waning. A critic who has shown unsur-
passed insight and sympathy in his estimate of Pope wrote, in
1881, 'No one will venture to say Pope's Iliad has gone, or is
likely to go, out of fashion ? ' One would be glad to feel that this
judgment and forecast were not unduly optimistic.
Shortly after the long labour of the Iliad was over, Pope was
engaged in two fresh enterprises. The translation of the Odyssey
was shared with two Cambridge men, Elijah Fenton and William
Broome, to whom half the books were allotted, Fenton taking I, IV,
XIX and xx,and his colleague II, VI, VIII, XI, XII, XVI, XVIII and XXIII,
while Pope translated the rest and assumed, in addition, the office of
revision. The first three volumes were published in 1725, and the
remaining two in the next year. Pope's general supervision of the
translation, and the skill with which his subordinates assumed his
style, prevented any obvious contrast between the parts. The cor-
respondence between Pope, Broome and Fenton throws light on one
of the least honourable incidents in Pope's career. He received
by subscription £4500, out of which he allowed Broome £570 and
Fenton £200. He was entitled to demand the lion's share; but, after
vainly endeavouring to suppress the details of the collaboration,
he induced Broome to allow a statement to appear under his name
which led the public to suppose the chief partner to be responsible
for all but five books. The weariness that had come over Pope
told on his execution, nor was the Odyssey so congenial a subject
to him. He had been at his best in the speeches of the Niad and
groaned most heavily over the homely scenes in Ithaca.
a
1 In 1740, J. and P. Knapton brought out in two volumes, Selecta Poemata Italorum
Qui Latine Scripserunt. Accurante A. Pope, based on an anonymous selection by
Atterbury (1684). There are several traces in Pope's works of his indebtedness to
renascence Latin verse.
2 Courthope, W. J. , The Works of Alexander Pope, vol. I, p. 35.
## p. 77 (#101) #############################################
Pope's Shakespeare.
Friends and Foes 77
Pope's treatment of his coadjutors figured prominently hence-
forward in the personalities of his opponents. But the Odyssey
was also the occasion of his friendship with Joseph Spence, through
the latter's Essay on Pope's Odyssey (1726–7). During this time,
Pope had been engaged on his edition of Shakespeare, undertaken
at Tonson's invitation and published in March 1725. His main
disqualifications are patent. He had no intimate knowledge of
the Elizabethan period and lacked some of the qualities-above
all the patience-requisite for a thorough editing of the text.
But a man of his genius could hardly devote himself to a literary
subject without leaving some result. “Proofs of the time and toil he
spent upon the text can be found on nearly every page 1. His
preface has, at least, the merit of a sincere recognition of Shake-
speare's greatness. The task of pointing out the errors in Pope's
edition was undertaken by Lewis Theobald, a man memorable for
his high deserts among Shakespearean critics? This was the offence
that gained him the laurel in The Dunciad. Pope's labours as
translator and commentator left him little leisure for original verse.
Among the shorter pieces of this period is the Epistle to Robert Earl
of Oxford, and Earl Mortimer (1721), dedicating Parnell's Poems
to him. Pope excels all other men, even Dryden, in the compli-
ments he pays his friends; and, for variety of music and dignity of
style, this Epistle is unsurpassed. Admirable, too, is the skill
with which Harley's indolence is elevated to the rank of a rare
virtue. Whatever may be the historical verdict on Harley as
a politician, Pope has cast an unfading halo about the memory
of
the man.
Thanks to Homer, Pope had thriven; he had settled in his
Twickenham villa in 1719 and associated on equal terms with the
first men of his day. But, though he had a heart capable of strong
affection and generosity, he was apt to brood over injuries real
and imaginary, and employ to the full his 'proper power to hurt. '
He had provoked Dennis, in An Essay on Criticism, and avenged
himself on Dennis's Reflections by The Narrative of Dr Robert
Norris (1713), ostensibly in reply to the criticisms on Cato.
Addison's dissociation of himself from this attack, probably, con-
tributed to the estrangement between them. Two years later, Pope,
who sent several papers to The Guardian, resented a eulogy there
of Ambrose Philips's Pastorals, and wrote a paper (15 April 1713)
1
1 Cf. ante, vol. v, p. 269; and see Lounsbury, T. R. , The first editors of Shake.
speare, p. 100.
? Cf. ante, vol. v, pp. 270—1.
## p. 78 (#102) #############################################
78
Pope
contrasting his own Pastorals with Philips's and giving the pre-
ference to the latter. In 1716, he retorted on Curll for having
published Court Poems, ascribing them to the laudible translator
of Homer,' by A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Bar-
barous Revenge by Poison on the Body of Edmund Curll. Towards
the end of queen Anne's reign, Pope, Swift, Gay, Parnell and others
had been in the habit of meeting at Arbuthnot's rooms in St James's
palace. Nights with these gatherings had closed Harley's toilsome
days. A literary scheme with which this informal club dallied
was a satire on various forms of pedantry in the person of an
imaginary Martinus Scriblerus 1. In 1726, Swift had revisited
England after twelve years' absence, and stayed for part of his
time at Twickenham, Gay being a fellow guest. He repeated the
visit in the following year. In June 1727, appeared the first two
volumes of Miscellanies. The preface was signed jointly by Swift
and Pope. Miscellanies, the last volume, 1728, contained the
character of Addison which had first appeared in Cytherea: or
poems upon Love and Intrigue, 1723, and now received new
additions. A fragment of a Satire corresponds to lines 151—214
of the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, though, in its latest form, quite
half the lines have undergone change. But the exercise in the
gentle art' which made most stir was the opening piece of the
volume, Pope's Martinus Scriblerus NEPI BAOOTE: or the
Art of Sinking in Poetry. In this, the Bathos or Profund, the
Natural Taste of Man and in particular the present age' was
discussed and illustrated by quotations from Blackmore (who had
rebuked Pope for an unseemly parody of the first Psalm), Ambrose
Philips, Theobald, Dennis, Welsted, Thomas Cooke and others.
In chapter vi, the several kinds of geniuses in the ‘Profund' are
classified as ostriches, parrots, porpoises and so forth, and three
or four sets of initials are given in each class. Pope's intention,
apparently, was to draw down attacks from the offended authors
so that he might have a pretext for the publication of The Dunciad,
which he was now preparing to bring out. In the preface to the
1728 edition of this work, the reader is told that
every week for these last two months past the town has been persecuted with
pamphlets, advertisements, and weekly essays, not only against the wit and
writings, but against the character and person of Mr Pope.
But it has been shown that, when the provocation is considered,
the attacks made upon Pope were extremely few, and did not
include a single pamphlet, while four of them, if not Pope's own
I Cf. post, chap. v.
? Lounsbury, u. s. p. 207.
## p. 79 (#103) #############################################
The Dunciad
79
handiwork, were inspired by him. It was evident, too, that the
composition of the poem had preceded the attacks. It seems to
have been on the stocks, in some form or other, for several years.
What determined its plan and hastened its completion was, un-
doubtedly, the pain given him by Theobald's Shakespeare Restored,
which must have been all the keener because he could not fail
to perceive the justice of the criticism. In the preface to the
1729 edition of The Dunciad, the dedication to Swift is said to
have been due to the fact that the latter had snatched the first
draft of the poem from the fire and urged the author to proceed
with it. Pope was certainly engaged on The Dunciad when Swift
was his guest, and the latter claimed some credit for the work
on the ground that his deafness had prevented conversation. But
it has never been shown that he had any actual share in the com-
position of the work. The story of its publication reveals one of
the most intricate series of manoeuvres in which Pope was ever
implicated. Evidently, he felt anxious at the thought of putting
before the public the whole mass of his personalities, and of ac-
knowledging them under his own name. The Dunciad appeared,
anonymously, in May 1728. It bore on the title ‘Dublin Printed,
London Re-printed for A. Dodd,' and was advertised as the second
edition. Its success was immediate, and several further issues
followed. Pope was emboldened to bring out a more elaborate
form in 1729. Names, with a very few exceptions, were now printed
in full, whereas, in the previous edition, initial and final letters,
or initial only, had been the rule. The dedicatory lines to Swift,
which had been purposely omitted, were restored and the poem
was garnished with ‘Notes Variorum and the Prolegomena of
Scriblerus. ' An elaborate piece of caution on Pope's part was to
assign the copyright to Lords Bathurst, Burlington and Oxford,
who afterwards assigned it to Lawton Gilliver. Its authorship
was not openly acknowledged till 1735. The main idea of The
Dunciad was taken from Mac Flecknoe, and, in emulating his
master's vigorous satire, Pope must have felt that he was put
upon his mettle. The Dunciad, even in its earlier form, is four
times the length of Mac Flecknoe, and, while Dryden's assault is
almost exclusively upon Shadwell, Pope, though aiming principally
at Theobald, attacked, at the same time, whole battalions of his
enemies. There are two sides to The Dunciad. Though Pope's
claim that the lash was lifted in the interests of all honest men
must be rejected, he was not merely indulging in an outburst of
personal malice. In places, especially in the book added later
## p. 80 (#104) #############################################
80
Pope
there is effective chastisement of literary vices, without an undue
admixture of the personal element. But his treating The Dunciad
like a large open grave into which fresh bodies of his victims
could be flung, has impaired the value of his general satire. The
tremendous energy with which he dealt damnation round the
land' has had a result which would have astounded himself,
Though our protests are challenged by the presence of some
names, such as Bentley and Defoe, yet, with regard to the bulk
of his victims, the reader is apt to feel even more than acqui-
escence in Pope's verdict.
