Alexander Pope.
Alexander Pope, the son of Catholic parents in the trading class, was born in the year of Revolution, 1688. His education was private, priests were his tutors, but he acquired Latin, and was from childhood a great reader of poetry, and an imitator of what he read. He was not born deformed, but overstudy, perhaps, or unnoted accident, made him the stunted and crooked thing that he became, while his health, and the hideous personal insults which his enemies used as freely as Hazlitt did in later times, exasperated his temper.
His parents withdrew to Windsor Forest, a centre of Catholic families like the Blounts and Englefields. Pope was early introduced to the coffee-house wits by the most chivalrous and accomplished of men, Charles Wogan, who, in 1719, rescued from prison in Austria, and brought to her affianced prince in Italy, Clementina Sobieska, mother of Prince Charles.
Pope corresponds very early, on literary subjects, with the veteran Wycherley (of whom Pope\'s account is, as always, quite untrustworthy) and with "knowing Walsh". He taught himself verse by translating the Latin poet Statius, and at 21 published, in 1709, his "Pastorals," "written at the age of 16," according to Pope.
It is not possible here to examine all Pope\'s statements about his works, all his really ingenious ways of fishing for fame, of mystifying; and, with none of the coarseness of our contemporary literary advertisement, of acting as his own interviewer and his own[Pg 383] advertiser. He had no need to practise these arts, but his methods are amusing as exposed by his learned and hostile editor, Elwin. Pope\'s great delight was in literary quarrels, and he managed to pick some very pretty quarrels out of remarks on his pastorals and those of Philips which appeared in "The Guardian". Pope preluded his pastorals by an essay on pastoral poetry in general; a genre of which it may be said that Theocritus (using literary models, such as Stesichorus, and also familiar with the songs of Sicilian peasants) introduced it in immortal poems; Virgil imitated Theocritus: and Pope thinks that Virgil "refines upon his original, and in all points when judgment is principally concerned, he is much superior to his master". It would have been pleasant to set down Pope to the construing of a few passages from Theocritus. Pope kept pretty close to his originals: and follows his own advice "the numbers should be the smoothest, the most easy and flowing imaginable". The brevity of the pastorals, their smoothness, and their avoidance of the "burning questions" of the day, so commonly intruded into Elizabethan pastorals, permit Pope\'s to be read with ease and even with pleasure.
In the "Essay on Criticism" (1711) we find Pope with an ambition to reform the world of literature. It is not easy to find out exactly what he would be at, for he uses such terms as "Nature," "wit," "judgment," in various ways. Nature seems permanent enough, but human views of "Nature" differ perpetually, and when Pope says, "First follow Nature," what does he mean by "Nature"? Why are "wit" and "judgment" "at strife"? The poet refers them to Nature as interpreted by Greek art for a verdict; and of Greek art he knew very little. Read Homer and Virgil, especially Virgil, he says. The poem, though it teaches us little about criticism, is full of lines so witty and so pointed that they are now proverbial.
In 1713 he published "Windsor Forest," admired by Swift, his life-long friend; with Addison he was on apparently good terms, but he was already suspicious. He attacked Dennis, who had assailed Addison\'s "Cato," and he did so in a style which Addison, through Steele, repudiated. Addison\'s praise of Philips\'s pastorals, with their Fairies, to Pope appeared dispraise of his[Pg 384] own; and in an article in "The Guardian" he made fun of Philips with ingenious irony of commendation.
Pope\'s great work, his version of the "Iliad," appearing in portions (1715-1720), met a kind of challenge in Tickell\'s version of the First Book. Addison spoke well of Tickell\'s specimen; did he write it, or inspire it, or set it up as a rival to Pope\'s? Pope, much later, told his own story of his wrongs and of his noble and dignified treatment of Addison. His most loyal biographer cannot accept the tale: at all events Pope wrote, and much later published, his famous verses on Addison (Atticus). (Published, 1722, after Addison\'s death.) The two men ceased to be friends, but Addison never hit back. Pope had also suspected him for doubts as to the wisdom of adding to the first shape of "The Rape of the Lock" (1712) the machinery of Sylphs and Gnomes in the second form (1714). The addition was deservedly successful, but Addison might well hesitate to recommend a change in that tiny mock-epic of a quarrel about the stealing of a lock of hair. It is perfection in its way, in its wit, sauciness, and gaiety.
The "Iliad," a terrible task for Pope, executed through long years of advice from all quarters, of doubt, and of weariness, was a triumph, celebrated in charming verses by Gay\'s "Welcome to Mr. Pope on His Return from Greece". In that strange age the noble, the great, the beautiful swelled Pope\'s triumph; literature was fashionable. Pope\'s "Iliad" can never be superseded as a masterpiece of English literature. He was no scholar, but he had many friends to help him, and his plan was to give the spirit of the Epic, as he conceived it, in a form which his age could appreciate. It is almost as if he had taken Homer\'s theme and written the poem himself. The minor characteristics of the antique manner are gone; but his age would have thought them barbarous and fatiguing. Wherever there is rhetoric, as in the speeches of the heroes, Pope is magnificent; where there are pictures of external nature he is conventional. But he is never slow. His conventions were those of his age, and are extinct, but time cannot abate the splendour of his spirit.
In doing the "Odyssey," of which the first part appeared in 1725, he was aided by Fenton and Broome, who, under his supervision,[Pg 385] wrote exactly like himself. With them, too, there were quarrels; they were not paid in what they reckoned a satisfactory style. Pope received about ￡10,000 in all for Homer, a large sum in those days, and not likely to be equalled by the gains of any later translator of Homer. He dabbled in the shares of the South Sea Bubble, and appears to have been rather a winner than a loser.
He had accumulated quarrels to his heart\'s content, hence "The Dunciad" of 1728-1729: a satire on minor men of letters, in which he shows wit and ill-nature enough, with a vein of true poetry in the conclusion; but the dirt and the personalities are now rather amazing than agreeable; while the necessary notes below drive the text into the garrets of the page. Not even Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had laughed at Pope\'s attempts to make love to her, escaped a flick of the whip of scandal in "The Dunciad". Perhaps Pope had not been gently treated, but nobody admires his revenges. The business of publication was managed with all the intricate wiles and subterfuges in which he took such strange delight. One of his butts, Cibber, retorted in kind, and was successful in giving pain: Theobald, a useful editor of Shakespeare, Pope assailed, because Theobald had not spared the errors in his own edition (1728).
His later works, Epistles to Burlington and Arbuthnot, "The Essay on Man," the "Imitations of Horace," are full of the wit and polished verse that were natural to Pope, and were fostered by his friendships with St. John (Bolingbroke), Swift, Gay, and Arbuthnot; friendships that never failed, and eternally testify to the better part in Pope, despite his tempers of malice and his feline arts. His enthusiasm for Atterbury, exhibited in letters written before the bishop\'s too well-merited exile, is the most romantic point in his career. Late in life he was kind to Johnson and Thomson; he had been a good son; his character greatly irritated his most learned editor, Mr. Elwin; but nobody suffered so much from his faults of jealousy and suspiciousness as Pope himself. He died on 30 May, 1744.
Ever since the romantic movement of the early nineteenth century, people have asked "Was Pope a poet?" He was, in the highest degree, the kind of poet that his age and the English[Pg 386] society of his age desired and deserved; a town poet—where rural nature is concerned, conventional and unobservant; where Man is concerned a poet of Man, literary, political, and fashionable. In the great fight over Pope\'s claim to be a poet, of 1819, when Bowles was the assailant, Byron was the champion of Pope: Byron himself being a satirist and a poet of mankind, urban, political, and fashionable, as well as piratical. Horace was busied with the same field of human nature (not with the desperate pirate and remorseful Giaour) but nobody has asked "Was Horace a poet?"
Pope wrote in reaction against the conceited poetry of the seventeenth century; he did well, though the manner was already dead, but he never came within sight or hearing of the inspired songs of Lovelace and Carew. The world of Pope was in many ways a limited and evanescent and artificial world; but in his verse it lives eternally, and that is enough for his fame, and testimony sufficient to his genius. He brought his instrument, the decasyllabic couplet, to the perfection required for his purpose, each couplet existing in and for itself. But in reading him we feel that "paper-sparing Pope" wrote down his best passages, detached, on the backs of letters; they are separate inspirations, and are fitted into the whole like fragments of a mosaic: for example the lines on Atticus are fitted into "The Epistle to Arbuthnot". His rhymes, as "fault" to "thought," are not the things on which he bestowed most pains.
Concerning other poets—Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare—we feel that, in any age of literature, in any period of taste, under any conventions, they must have been great. Pope, on the other hand, cannot easily be thought of as having the capacity for greatness, except in the literary conditions of the early eighteenth century. But in that period he was supreme.
Prior.
From the galaxy of wits who dined with Harley and St. John and were addressed in that splendid society by their Christian names, Jonathan or Mat, Matthew Prior stands somewhat apart. His duties as a diplomatist carried him abroad; he owed his diplomatic posts to his wit, not to his birth, which Queen Anne[Pg 387] spoke of as unpleasantly obscure. He was born on 14 July, 1664, at Wimborne or Winburn, in Dorsetshire; Westminster was his school, and St. John\'s, Cambridge, his college. Here he took his degree, in 1686, and obtained a fellowship in 1688. He attracted the notice of the Whigs by parodying Dryden\'s "Hind and Panther," in "The Town and Country Mouse," aided in the jest by Charles Montagu. Dryden is very improbably said to have wept; the Whigs, at all events, laughed, and in 1691 made Prior secretary to the Embassy in Holland. He held the same post at Versailles later; at this time he was a sincere eulogist of our Dutch deliverer, William III, whom he celebrated in "The Carmen Seculare" (1700), indeed constantly, like Horace, he "praising his tyrant sung". Reviewing history, he places William before a number of Roman heroes, and, remembering that William\'s wife is a Stuart, bids the god Janus
Finding some of Stuart\'s race
Unhappy, pass their annals by.
But, as thou dwell\'st upon that heavenly name
To grief for ever sacred, as to fame,
O! read it to thyself: in silence weep!
Is the name Charles or Mary? At this time there was a fashionable cult of Mary Stuart. This long ode, granting the mythology, has considerable merit, though, says Dr. Johnson, "Who can be supposed to have laboured through it?" Not the Doctor, as he candidly confesses.
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