Outlines of English and American Literature Part 18

Pope, "An Essay on Criticism"

HISTORY OF THE PERIOD. The most striking political feature of the times was the rise of const.i.tutional and party government. The Revolution of 1688, which banished the Stuarts, had settled the king question by making Parliament supreme in England, but not all Englishmen were content with the settlement. No sooner were the people in control of the government than they divided into hostile parties: the liberal Whigs, who were determined to safeguard popular liberty, and the conservative Tories, with tender memories of kingcraft, who would leave as much authority as possible in the royal hands. On the extreme of Toryism was a third party of zealots, called the Jacobites, who aimed to bring the Stuarts back to the throne, and who for fifty years filled Britain with plots and rebellion. The literature of the age was at times dominated by the interests of these contending factions.

The two main parties were so well balanced that power s.h.i.+fted easily from one to the other. To overturn a Tory or a Whig cabinet only a few votes were necessary, and to influence such votes London was flooded with pamphlets. Even before the great newspapers appeared, the press had become a mighty power in England, and any writer with a talent for argument or satire was almost certain to be hired by party leaders. Addison, Steele, Defoe, Swift,--most of the great writers of the age were, on occasion, the willing servants of the Whigs or Tories. So the new politician replaced the old n.o.bleman as a patron of letters.

[Sidenote: SOCIAL LIFE]

Another feature of the age was the rapid development of social life. In earlier ages the typical Englishman had lived much by himself; his home was his castle, and in it he developed his intense individualism; but in the first half of the eighteenth century some three thousand public coffeehouses and a large number of private clubs appeared in London alone; and the sociability of which these clubs were an expression was typical of all English cities. Meanwhile country life was in sore need of refinement.

The influence of this social life on literature was inevitable.

Nearly all writers frequented the coffeehouses, and matters discussed there became subjects of literature; hence the enormous amount of eighteenth-century writing devoted to transient affairs, to politics, fas.h.i.+ons, gossip. Moreover, as the club leaders set the fas.h.i.+on in manners or dress, in the correct way of taking snuff or of wearing wigs and ruffles, so the literary leaders emphasized formality or correctness of style, and to write prose like Addison, or verse like Pope, became the ambition of aspiring young authors.

There are certain books of the period (seldom studied amongst its masterpieces) which are the best possible expression of its thought and manners. The Letters of Lord Chesterfield, for example, especially those written to his son, are more significant, and more readable, than anything produced by Johnson. Even better are the Memoirs of Horace Walpole, and his gossipy Letters, of which Thackeray wrote:

"Fiddles sing all through them; wax lights, fine dresses, fine jokes, fine plate, fine equipages glitter and sparkle; never was such a brilliant, smirking Vanity Fair as that through which he leads us."

[Sidenote: SPREAD OF EMPIRE]

Two other significant features of the age were the large part played by England in Continental wars, and the rapid expansion of the British empire. These Continental wars, which have ever since influenced British policy, seem to have originated (aside from the important matter of self-interest) in a double motive: to prevent any one nation from gaining overwhelming superiority by force of arms, and to save the smaller "buffer" states from being absorbed by their powerful neighbors. Thus the War of the Spanish Succession (1711) prevented the union of the French and Spanish monarchies, and preserved the smaller states of Holland and Germany. As Addison then wrote, at least half truthfully:

'T is Britain's care to watch o'er Europe's fate, And hold in balance each contending state: To threaten bold, presumptuous kings with war, And answer her afflicted neighbors' prayer. [1]

[Footnote [1]: From Addison's Address to Liberty, in his poetical "Letter to Lord Halifax."]

The expansion of the empire, on the whole the most marvelous feature of English history, received a tremendous impetus in this age when India, Australia and the greater part of North America were added to the British dominions, and when Captain Cook opened the way for a belt of colonies around the whole world.

The influence of the last-named movement hardly appears in the books which we ordinarily read as typical of the age. There are other books, however, which one may well read for his own unhampered enjoyment: such expansive books as Hawkesworth's _Voyages_ (1773), corresponding to Hakluyt's famous record of Elizabethan exploration, and especially the _Voyages of Captain Cook_, [Footnote: The first of Cook's fateful voyages appears in Hawkesworth's collection. The second was recorded by Cook himself (1777), and the third by Cook and Captain King (1784). See Synge, _Captain Cook's Voyages Around the World_ (London, 1897).]

which take us from the drawing-room chatter of politics or fas.h.i.+on or criticism into a world of adventure and great achievement. In such works, which make no profession of literary style, we feel the lure of the sea and of lands beyond the horizon, which is as the mighty background of English literature from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day.

It is difficult to summarize the literature of this age, or to group such antagonistic writers as Swift and Addison, Pope and Burns, Defoe and Johnson, Goldsmith and Fielding, with any fine discrimination. It is simply for convenience, therefore, that we study eighteenth-century writings in three main divisions: the reign of so-called cla.s.sicism, the revival of romantic poetry, and the beginnings of the modern novel. As a whole, it is an age of prose rather than of poetry, and in this respect it differs from all preceding ages of English literature.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CLa.s.sICISM

The above t.i.tle is an unfortunate one, but since it is widely used we must try to understand it as best we can. Yet when one begins to define "cla.s.sicism" one is reminded of that old bore Polonius, who tells how Hamlet is affected:

Your n.o.ble son is mad: Mad, call I it; for to define true madness, What is't but to be nothing else but mad?

In our literature the word "cla.s.sic" was probably first used in connection with the writers of Greece and Rome, and any English work which showed the influence of such writers was said to have a cla.s.sic style. If we seek to the root of the word, we shall find that it refers to the _cla.s.sici_, that is, to the highest of the cla.s.ses into which the census divided the Roman people; hence the proper use of "cla.s.sic" to designate the writings that have won first rank in any nation. As Goethe said, "Everything that is good in literature is cla.s.sical."

[Sidenote: CLa.s.sIC AND PSEUDO-CLa.s.sIC]

Gradually, however, the word "cla.s.sic" came to have a different meaning, a meaning now expressed by the word "formal." In the Elizabethan age, as we have seen, critics insisted that English plays should conform to the rules or "unities" of the Greek drama, and plays written according to such rules were called cla.s.sic. Again, in the eighteenth century, English poets took to studying ancient authors, especially Horace, to find out how poetry should be written. Having discovered, as they thought, the rules of composition, they insisted on following such rules rather than individual genius or inspiration. It is largely because of this adherence to rules, this slavery to a fas.h.i.+on of the time, that so much of eighteenth-century verse seems cold and artificial, a thing made to order rather than the natural expression of human feeling. The writers themselves were well satisfied with their formality, however, and called their own the Cla.s.sic or Augustan age of English letters. [Footnote: Though the eighteenth century was dominated by this formal spirit, it had, like every other age, its cla.s.sic and romantic movements. The work of Gray, Burns and other romantic poets will be considered later.]

ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744)

It was in 1819 that a controversy arose over the question, Was Pope a poet?

To have asked that in 1719 would have indicated that the questioner was ignorant; to have asked it a half century later might have raised a doubt as to his sanity, for by that time Pope was acclaimed as a master by the great majority of poets in England and America. We judge now, looking at him in perspective and comparing him with Chaucer or Burns, that he was not a great poet but simply the kind of poet that the age demanded. He belongs to eighteenth-century London exclusively, and herein he differs from the master poets who are at home in all places and expressive of all time.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ALEXANDER POPE]

LIFE. Pope is an interesting but not a lovable figure. Against the petty details of his life we should place, as a background, these amazing achievements: that this poor cripple, weak of body and spiteful of mind, was the supreme literary figure of his age; that he demonstrated how an English poet could live by his pen, instead of depending on patrons; that he won greater fame and fortune than Shakespeare or Milton received from their contemporaries; that he dominated the fas.h.i.+on of English poetry during his lifetime, and for many years after his death.

[Sidenote: THE WRITER]

Such are the important facts of Pope's career. For the rest: he was born in London, in the year of the Revolution (1688). Soon after that date his father, having gained a modest fortune in the linen business, retired to Binfield, on the fringe of Windsor Forest.

There Pope pa.s.sed his boyhood, studying a little under private tutors, forming a pleasurable acquaintance with Latin and Greek poets. From fourteen to twenty, he tells us, he read for amus.e.m.e.nt; but from twenty to twenty-seven he read for "improvement and instruction." The most significant traits of these early years were his determination to be a poet and his talent for imitating any writer who pleased him. Dryden was his first master, from whom he inherited the couplet, then he imitated the French critic Boileau and the Roman poet Horace. By the time he was twenty four the publication of his _Essay on Criticism_ and _The Rape of the Lock_ had made him the foremost poet of England. By his translation of Homer he made a fortune, with which he bought a villa at Twickenham. There he lived in the pale suns.h.i.+ne of literary success, and there he quarreled with every writer who failed to appreciate his verses, his jealousy overflowing at last in _The Dunciad_ (Iliad of Dunces), a witty but venomous lampoon, in which he took revenge on all who had angered him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TWICKENHAM PARISH CHURCH, WHERE POPE WAS BURIED Pope lived at Twickenham for nearly thirty years]

[Sidenote: THE MAN]

Next to his desire for glory and revenge, Pope loved to be considered a man of high character, a teacher of moral philosophy.

His ethical teaching appears in his _Moral Epistles_, his desire for a good reputation is written large in his Letters, which he secretly printed, and then alleged that they had been made public against his wish. These Letters might impress us as the utterances of a man of n.o.ble ideals, magnanimous with his friends, patient with his enemies, until we reflect that they were published by the author for the purpose of giving precisely that impression.

Another side of Pope's nature is revealed in this: that to some of his friends, to Swift and Bolingbroke for example, he showed grat.i.tude, and that to his parents he was ever a dutiful son. He came perhaps as near as he could to a real rather than an artificial sentiment when he wrote of his old mother:

Me let the tender office long engage, To rock the cradle of reposing age.

WORKS OF POPE. Pope's first important work, _An Essay on Criticism_ (1711), is an echo of the rules which Horace had formulated in his _Ars Poetica_, more than seventeen centuries before Pope was born. The French critic Boileau made an alleged improvement of Horace in his _L'Art Poetique_, and Pope imitated both writers with his rimed _Essay_, in which he attempted to sum up the rules by which poetry should be judged.

And he did it, while still under the age of twenty-five, so brilliantly that his characterization of the critic is unmatched in our literature. A few selections will serve to show the character of the work:

First follow nature, and your judgment frame By her just standard, which is still the same: Unerring nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchanged and universal light, Life, force and beauty must to all impart, At once the source and end and test of Art.

Poets, like painters, thus unskilled to trace The naked nature and the living grace, With gold and jewels cover every part, And hide with ornaments their want of art.

True wit is nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.

Expression is the dress of thought, and still Appears more decent, as more suitable.

[Sidenote: RAPE OF THE LOCK]

Pope's next important poem, _The Rape of the Lock_ (1712), is his most original and readable work. The occasion of the poem was that a fop stole a lock of hair from a young lady, and the theft plunged two families into a quarrel which was taken up by the fas.h.i.+onable set of London. Pope made a mock-heroic poem on the subject, in which he satirized the fads and fas.h.i.+ons of Queen Anne's age. Ordinarily Pope's fancy is of small range, and proceeds jerkily, like the flight of a woodp.e.c.k.e.r, from couplet to couplet; but here he attempts to soar like the eagle. He introduces dainty aerial creatures, gnomes, sprites, sylphs, to combat for the belles and fops in their trivial concerns; and herein we see a clever burlesque of the old epic poems, in which G.o.ds or G.o.ddesses entered into the serious affairs of mortals. The craftsmans.h.i.+p of the poem is above praise; it is not only a neatly pointed satire on eighteenth-century fas.h.i.+ons but is one of the most graceful works in English verse.

[Sidenote: ESSAY OF MAN]

An excellent supplement to _The Rape of the Lock_, which pictures the superficial elegance of the age, is _An Essay on Man_, which reflects its philosophy. That philosophy under the general name of Deism, had fancied to abolish the Church and all revealed religion, and had set up a new-old standard of natural faith and morals. Of this philosophy Pope had small knowledge; but he was well acquainted with the discredited Bolingbroke, his "guide, philosopher and friend," who was a fluent exponent of the new doctrine, and from Bolingbroke came the general scheme of the _Essay on Man_.

The poem appears in the form of four epistles, dealing with man's place in the universe, with his moral nature, with social and political ethics, and with the problem of happiness. These were discussed from a common-sense viewpoint, and with feet always on solid earth. As Pope declares:

Know then thyself, presume not G.o.d to scan; The proper study of mankind is man....

Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled; The glory, jest and riddle of the world.

Throughout the poem these two doctrines of Deism are kept in sight: that there is a G.o.d, a Mystery, who dwells apart from the world; and that man ought to be contented, even happy, in his ignorance of matters beyond his horizon: