Hours in a Library Volume I Part 6

There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl The feast of reason and the flow of soul; And he whose lightning pierced the Iberian lines Now farms my quincunx, and now ranks my vines, And tames the genius of the stubborn plain Almost as quickly as he conquered Spain.

Or again, there are the verses in which he antic.i.p.ates the dying words attributed to Pitt:--

And you, brave Cobham, to the latest breath, Shall feel the ruling pa.s.sion strong in death; Such in those moments, as in all the past, 'Oh, save my country, Heaven!' shall be your last.

Cobham's name, again, suggests the spirited lines--

Spirit of Arnall! aid me while I lie, Cobham's a coward, Polwarth is a slave, And Lyttelton a dark, designing knave; St. John has ever been a wealthy fool-- But let me add Sir Robert's mighty dull, Has never made a friend in private life, And was, besides, a tyrant to his wife.

Perhaps the last compliment is ambiguous, but Walpole's name again reminds us that Pope could on occasion be grateful even to an opponent.

'Go see Sir Robert,' suggests his friend in the epilogue to the Satires; and Pope replies--

Seen him I have; but in his happier hour Of social pleasure, ill exchanged for power; Seen him unc.u.mbered with the venal tribe Smile without art, and win without a bribe; Would he oblige me? Let me only find He does not think me what he thinks mankind; Come, come; at all I laugh, he laughs no doubt; The only difference is, I dare laugh out.

But there is no end to the delicate flattery which may be set off against Pope's ferocious onslaughts upon his enemies. If one could have a wish for the asking, one could scarcely ask for a more agreeable sensation than that of being t.i.tillated by a man of equal ingenuity in caressing one's pet vanities. The art of administering such consolation is possessed only by men who unite such tenderness to an exquisitely delicate intellect. This vein of genuine feeling sufficiently redeems Pope's writings from the charge of a commonplace worldliness. Certainly he is not one of the 'genial' school, whose indiscriminate benevolence exudes over all that they touch. There is nothing mawkish in his philanthropy. Pope was, if anything, too good a hater; 'the portentous cub never forgives,' said Bentley; but kindliness is all the more impressive when not too widely diffused. Add to this his hearty contempt for pomposities, humbugs, and stupidities of all kinds, and above all the fine spirit of independence, in which we have again the real man, and which expresses itself in such lines as these:

Oh, let me live my own, and die so too!

(To live and die is all I have to do); Maintain a poet's dignity and ease, And see what friends and read what books I please.

And we may admit that Pope, in spite of his wig and his stays, his vanities and his affectations, was in his way as fair an embodiment as we would expect of that 'plain living and high thinking' of which Wordsworth regretted the disappearance. The little cripple, diseased in mind and body, spiteful and occasionally brutal, had in him the spirit of a man. The monarch of the literary world was far from immaculate; but he was not without a dignity of his own.

We come, however, to the question, what had Pope to say upon the deepest subjects with which human beings can concern themselves? The most explicit answer must be taken from the 'Essay on Man,' and the essay must be acknowledged to have more conspicuous faults than any of Pope's writings. The art of reasoning in verse is so difficult that we may doubt whether it is in any case legitimate, and must acknowledge that it has been never successfully practised by any English writer. Dryden's 'Religio Laici' may be better reasoning, but it is worse poetry than Pope's Essay. It is true, again, that Pope's reasoning is intrinsically feeble. He was no metaphysician, and confined himself to putting together incoherent sc.r.a.ps of different systems. Some of his arguments strike us as simply childish, as, for example, the quibble derived from the Stoics, that

The blest to-day is as completely so As who began a thousand years ago.

n.o.body, we may safely say, was ever much comforted by that reflection.

Nor, though the celebrated argument about the scale of beings, which Pope but half-understood, was then sanctioned by the most eminent contemporary names, do we derive any deep consolation from the remark that

in the scale of reasoning life, 'tis plain, There must be somewhere such a rank as man.

To say no more of these frigid conceits, as they now appear to us, Pope does not maintain the serious temper which befits a man pondering upon the deep mysteries of the universe. Religious meditation does not harmonise with epigrammatical satire. Admitting the value of the reflection that other beings besides man are fitting objects of the Divine benevolence, we are jarred by such a discord as this:

While man exclaims, See all things for my use!

See man for mine! replies a pampered goose.

The goose is appropriate enough in Charron or Montaigne, but should be kept out of poetry. Such a shock, too, follows when Pope talks about the superior beings who

Showed a Newton as we show an ape.

Did anybody, again, ever complain that he wanted 'the strength of bulls, the fur of bears?'[2] Or could it be worth while to meet his complaints in a serious poem? Pope, in short, is not merely a bad reasoner, but he wants that deep moral earnestness which gives a profound interest to Johnson's satires--the best productions of his school--and the deeply pathetic religious feeling of Cowper.

Admitting all this, however, and more, the 'Essay on Man' still contains many pa.s.sages which not only testify to the unequalled skill of this great artist in words, but show a certain moral dignity. In the Essay, more than in any of his other writings, we have the difficulty of separating the solid bullion from the dross. Pope is here pre-eminently parasitical, and it is possible to trace to other writers, such as Montaigne, Pascal, Leibniz, Shaftesbury, Locke, and Wollaston, as well as to the inspiration of Bolingbroke, nearly every argument which he employs. He unfortunately worked up the rubbish as well as the gems.

When Mr. Ruskin says that his 'theology was two centuries in advance of his time,' the phrase is curiously inaccurate. He was not really in advance of the best men of his own time; but they, it is to be feared, were considerably in advance of the average opinion of our own. What may be said with more plausibility is, that whilst Pope frequently wastes his skill in gilding refuse, he is really most sensitive to the n.o.blest sentiments of his contemporaries, and that, when he has good materials to work upon, his verse glows with unusual fervour, often to sink with unpleasant rapidity into mere quibbling or epigrammatic pungency. The real truth is that Pope precisely expresses the position of the best thinkers of his day. He did not understand the reasoning, but he fully shared the sentiments of the philosophers among whom Locke and Leibniz were the great lights. Pope is to the deists and semi-deists of his time what Milton was to the Puritans or Dante to the Schoolmen. At times he writes like a Pantheist, and then becomes orthodox, without a consciousness of the transition; he is a believer in universal predestination, and saves himself by inconsistent language about 'leaving free the human will;' his views about the origin of society are an inextricable ma.s.s of inconsistency; and he may be quoted in behalf of doctrines which he, with the help of Warburton, vainly endeavoured to disavow. But, leaving sound divines to settle the question of his orthodoxy, and metaphysicians to crush his arguments, if they think it worth while, we are rather concerned with the general temper in which he regards the universe, and the moral which he draws for his own edification. The main doctrine which he enforces is, of course, one of his usual commonplaces. The statement that 'whatever is, is right,' may be verbally admitted, and strained to different purposes by half-a-dozen differing schools. It may be alleged by the cynic, who regards virtue as an empty name; by the mystic, who is lapped in heavenly contemplation from the cares of this troublesome world; by the sceptic, whose whole wisdom is concentrated in the duty of submitting to the inevitable; or by the man who, abandoning the attempt of solving inscrutable enigmas, is content to recognise in everything the hand of a Divine ordainer of all things. Pope, judging him by his most forcible pa.s.sages, prefers to insist upon the inevitable ignorance of man in presence of the Infinite:

'Tis but a part we see, and not the whole;

and any effort to pierce the impenetrable gloom can only end in disappointment and discontent:

In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies.

We think that we can judge the ways of the Almighty, and correct the errors of His work. We are as incapable of accounting for human wickedness as for plague, tempest, and earthquake. In each case our highest wisdom is an humble confession of ignorance; or, as he puts it,

In both, to reason right is to submit.

This vein of thought might, perhaps, have conducted him to the scepticism of his master, Bolingbroke. He unluckily fills up the gaps of his logical edifice with the untempered mortar of obsolete metaphysics, long since become utterly uninteresting to all men. Admitting that he cannot explain, he tries to manufacture sham explanations out of the 'scale of beings,' and other scholastic rubbish. But, in a sense, too, the most reverent minds will agree most fully with Pope's avowal of the limitation of human knowledge. He does not apply his scepticism or his humility to stimulate to vain repining against the fetters with which our minds are bound, or an angry denunciation, like that of Bolingbroke, of the solutions in which other souls have found a sufficient refuge.

The perplexity in which he finds himself generates a spirit of resignation and tolerance.

Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar; Wait the great teacher, Death, and G.o.d adore.

That is the pith of his teaching. All optimism is apt to be a little irritating to men whose sympathies with human suffering are unusually strong; and the optimism of a man like Pope, vivacious rather than profound in his thoughts and his sympathies, annoys us at times by his calm complacency. We cannot thrust aside so easily the thought of the heavy evils under which all creation groans. But we should wrong him by a failure to recognise the real benevolence of his sentiment. Pope indeed becomes too pantheistic for some tastes in the celebrated fragment--the whole poem is a conglomerate of slightly connected fragments--beginning,

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and G.o.d the soul.

But his real fault is that he is not consistently pantheistic. Pope was attacked both for his pantheism and fatalism and for having borrowed from Bolingbroke. It is curious enough that it was precisely these doctrines which he did not borrow. Bolingbroke, like most feeble reasoners, believed firmly in Free Will; and though a theist after a fas.h.i.+on, his religion had not emotional depth or logical coherence enough to be pantheistic. Pope, doubtless, did not here quit his master's guidance from any superiority in logical perception. But he did occasionally feel the poetical value of the pantheistic conception of the universe. Pantheism, in fact, is the only poetical form of the metaphysical theology current in Pope's day. The old historical theology of Dante, or even of Milton, was too faded for poetical purposes; and the 'personal Deity,' whose existence and attributes were proved by the elaborate reasonings of the apologists of that day, was unfitted for poetical celebration by the very fact that his existence required proof.

Poetry deals with intuitions, not with remote inferences, and therefore in his better moments Pope spoke not of the intelligent moral Governor discovered by philosophical investigation, but of the Divine Essence immanent in all nature, whose 'living raiment' is the world. The finest pa.s.sages in the 'Essay on Man,' like the finest pa.s.sages in Wordsworth, are an attempt to expound that view, though Pope falls back too quickly into epigram, as Wordsworth into prose. It was reserved for Goethe to show what a poet might learn from the philosophy of Spinoza. Meanwhile Pope, uncertain as is his grasp of any philosophical conceptions, shows, not merely in set phrases, but in the general colouring of his poem, something of that width of sympathy which should result from the pantheistic view. The tenderness, for example, with which he always speaks of the brute creation is pleasant in a writer so little distinguished as a rule by an interest in what we popularly call nature.

The 'scale of being' argument may be illogical, but we pardon it when it is applied to strengthen our sympathies with our unfortunate dependants on the lower steps of the ladder. The lamb who

Licks the hand just raised to shed his blood

is a second-hand lamb, and has, like so much of Pope's writing, acquired a certain tinge of ba.n.a.lity, which must limit quotation; and the same must be said of the poor Indian, who

thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog will bear him company.

But the sentiment is as right as the language (in spite of its familiarity we can still recognise the fact) is exquisite. Tolerance of all forms of faith, from that of the poor Indian upwards, is so characteristic of Pope as to have offended some modern critics who might have known better. We may pick holes in the celebrated ant.i.thesis

For forms of government let fools contest: Whate'er is best administered is best; For forms of faith let graceless zealots fight, He can't be wrong whose life is in the right.

Certainly, they are not mathematically accurate formulae; but they are generous, if imperfect, statements of great truths, and not unbecoming in the mouth of the man who, as the member of an unpopular sect, learnt to be cosmopolitan rather than bitter, and expressed his convictions in the well-known words addressed to Swift: 'I am of the religion of Erasmus, a Catholic; so I live, so I shall die; and hope one day to meet you, Bishop Atterbury, the younger Craggs, Dr. Garth, Dean Berkeley, and Mr. Hutchinson in heaven.' Who would wish to shorten the list? And the scheme of morality which Pope deduced for practical guidance in life is in harmony with the spirit which breathes in those words just quoted. A recent dispute in a court of justice shows that even our most cultivated men have forgotten Pope so far as to be ignorant of the source of the familiar words--

What can enn.o.ble sots, or slaves, or cowards?

Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards.

It is therefore necessary to say explicitly that the poem where they occur, the fourth epistle of the 'Essay on Man,' not only contains half-a-dozen other phrases equally familiar--_e.g._, 'An honest man's the n.o.blest work of G.o.d;'[3] 'Looks through nature up to nature's G.o.d;'

'From grave to gay, from lively to severe'--but breathes throughout sentiments which it would be credulous to believe that any man could express so vigorously without feeling profoundly. Mr. Ruskin has quoted one couplet as giving 'the most complete, the most concise, and the most lofty expression of moral temper existing in English words'--

Never elated, while one man's oppressed; Never dejected, whilst another's blessed.

The pa.s.sage in which they occur is worthy of this (let us admit, just a little over-praised) sentiment; and leads not unfitly to the conclusion and summary of the whole, that he who can recognise the beauty of virtue knows that

Where Faith, Law, Morals, all began, All end--in love of G.o.d and love of man.

I know but too well all that may be said against this view of Pope's morality. He is, as Ste.-Beuve says, the easiest of all men to caricature; and it is equally easy to throw cold water upon his morality. We may count up his affectations, ridicule his plat.i.tudes, make heavy deductions for his insincerity, denounce his too frequent indulgence in a certain love of dirt, which he shares with, and in which indeed he is distanced by, Swift; and decline to believe in the virtue, or even in the love of virtue, of a man stained by so many vices and weaknesses. Yet I must decline to believe that men can gather grapes off thorns, or figs off thistles, or n.o.ble expressions of moral truth from a corrupt heart thinly varnished by a coating of affectation. Turn it how we may, the thing is impossible. Pope was more than a mere literary artist, though he was an artist of unparalleled excellence in his own department. He was a man in whom there was the seed of many good thoughts, though choked in their development by the growth of innumerable weeds. And I will venture, in conclusion, to adduce one more proof of the justice of a lenient verdict. I have had already to quote many phrases familiar to everyone who is tinctured in the slightest degree with a knowledge of English literature; and yet have been haunted by a dim suspicion that some of my readers may have been surprised to recognise their author. Pope, we have seen, is recognised even by judges of the land only through the medium of Byron; and therefore the 'Universal Prayer' may possibly be unfamiliar to some readers. If so, it will do them no harm to read over again a few of its verses. Perhaps, after that experience, they will admit that the little cripple of Twickenham, distorted as were his instincts after he had been stretched on the rack of this rough world, and grievous as were his offences against the laws of decency and morality, had yet in him a n.o.ble strain of eloquence significant of deep religious sentiment. A phrase in the first stanza may shock us as bordering too closely on the epigrammatic; but the whole poem from which I take these stanzas must, I think, be recognised as the utterance of a tolerant, reverent, and kindly heart:

Father of all! in every age, In every clime adored, By saint, by savage, and by sage-- Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

Thou great First Cause, least understood, Who all my sense confined To know but this, that thou art good, And that myself am blind.