The Age of Pope Part 4

These _Imitations_ are introduced by the Prologue addressed to Dr.

Arbuthnot, a poem of more than common brilliancy, and also more than commonly venomous. Nowhere, perhaps, is there in Pope's works so powerful and bitter an attack as the twenty-five lines in the Prologue devoted to the vivisection of Lord Hervey, which we are forced to admire while feeling their malevolence; nowhere is there a more consummate piece of satire than the twenty-two lines that contain the poet's masterpiece, the character of Atticus; and nowhere, I may add, are there lines more personally interesting. Portions of the poem were written long before the date of publication, and this is Pope's excuse, a rather lame one perhaps, for printing the character of Atticus and the lines on his mother after the death of Addison and of Mrs. Pope.

'When I had a fever one winter in town,' Pope said to his friend Spence, 'that confined me to my room for some days, Lord Bolingbroke came to see me, happened to take up a Horace that lay on the table, and in turning it over dipt on the first satire of the second book. He observed how well that would hit my case if I were to imitate it in English. After he was gone I read it over, translated it in a morning or two, and sent it to press in a week or fortnight after. And this was the occasion of my imitating some other of the satires and epistles afterwards.'

Bolingbroke did his friend a better service in giving this advice than he had done with regard to the _Essay on Man_; and the six _Imitations_, with the Prologue and Epilogue, which are among the latest fruits of Pope's genius as a satirist, are also the ripest.

Warburton, writing of the _Imitations of Horace_, says: 'Whoever expects a paraphrase of Horace or a faithful copy of his genius or his manner of writing in these _Imitations_ will be much disappointed. Our author uses the Roman poet for little more than his canvas; and if the old design or colouring chance to suit his purpose, it is well; if not, he employs his own without scruple or ceremony.'

This is true. Pope makes use of Horace when it suits his convenience, but never follows him servilely, and quits him altogether when his design carries him another way.

It was inevitable that he should exercise this freedom, since, as Johnson has pointed out, there will always be an irreconcilable dissimilitude between Roman images and English manners. Moreover, the aim of the two poets was different, Pope's main object being to express personal enmities and to give an exalted notion of his own virtue.

In the opening lines of his First Satire Pope follows Horace pretty closely. Both poets complain that some persons think them too severe, and others too complaisant; both take the advice of a lawyer, Horace of C. Trebatius Testa, who gives him the pithiest replies; and Pope of Fortescue. Both complain that they cannot sleep, the prescription of a wife and cowslip wine being given by the English adviser, while Testa advises Horace to swim thrice across the Tiber and moisten his lips with wine. Throughout the rest of the satire Pope takes only casual glances at the Roman original, and if in the Second Satire the English poet follows Horace in the first few verses in recommending frugality, and in the advice to keep the middle state, and neither to lean on this side or on that, the resemblance between the poets is seldom striking, and the spirit which animates them is different,--Horace being cla.s.sical, and therefore open to the apprehension of all educated readers, while Pope is in a sense provincial, and, as I have already said with reference to the _Dunciad_, cannot be fully enjoyed or even understood without some knowledge of the time and of the men whom he lashes in his satire. The Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace, which Pope attempts to imitate, is, as Mr. Courthope observes, 'incapable of imitation. Its humour, no less than its philosophy, belongs entirely to the Pagan World.' In a general sense it is also true that Horace's style, whether of language or of thought, will not bear transplanting. Indeed, whatever is most characteristic and most exquisite in a poet's work is precisely the portion which cannot be clothed in a foreign dress.

'Life,' said Pope, 'when the first heats are over is all down hill,' and with him the downward progress began at a time when most men are still standing on the summit. Never was there a more fiery spirit in so weak a body. He suffered frequently from headaches, which he relieved by inhaling the steam of coffee. Unfortunately he pampered his appet.i.te and paid a heavy penalty for doing so. Every change of weather affected him; and at the time when most people indulge in company, he tells Swift that he hid himself in bed. Although he sneers at Lord Hervey for taking a.s.ses' milk he tried that remedy himself, and he frequently needed medical aid. In his early days he was strong enough to ride on horseback, but in later life his weakness was so great that he was in constant need of help. M. Taine, whose criticism of Pope needs to be read with caution, indulges in an exaggerated description of his bodily condition, observing that when arrived at maturity he appeared no longer capable of existing, and styling him 'a nervous abortion.' The poet's condition was sad enough as told by Dr. Johnson, without amplifying it as M. Taine has done. 'One side was contracted. His legs were so slender that he enlarged their bulk with three pairs of stockings, which were drawn on and off by the maid; for he was not able to dress or undress himself, and neither went to bed nor rose without help. His weakness made it very difficult for him to be clean.' After this forlorn description of the poet's state it is a little grotesque to read that his dress of ceremony was black, with a tie-wig and a little sword. A distorted body often holds a generous and untainted soul. This was not the case with Pope, and the sympathy he stood in so large a need of himself, was seldom given to others.

In the spring of 1744 it became evident that the end was approaching.

Three weeks before his death he distributed the _Moral Epistles_ among his friends, saying: 'Here I am, like Socrates, dispensing my morality amongst my friends just as I am dying.' He died peacefully on May 30th, 1744, and was buried in Twickenham Church near the monument erected to his parents.

Pope's standing among his country's poets has been the source of much controversy. There have been critics who deny to him the name of a poet, while others place him in the first rank. In his own century there was comparatively little difference of opinion with regard to his merits.

Chesterfield gave him the warmest praise; Swift, Addison, and Warburton ranked him with the peers of song; Johnson, whose discriminative criticism reaches perhaps its highest level in his _Life of Pope_, in reply to the question which had been asked, even in his day, whether Pope was a poet? asks in return, 'If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?' and adds that 'to circ.u.mscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer, though a definition which shall exclude Pope will not readily be made.' Joseph Warton, too, Johnson's contemporary and friend, while preferring the Romantic School to the Cla.s.sical, allows that in that species of poetry wherein Pope excelled he is superior to all mankind.

In our century Bowles, whose edition of his works provoked prolonged discussion, in which Campbell, Byron, and the _Quarterly Review_ took part, places Pope above Dryden. Byron, with more enthusiasm than judgment, regarded him as the greatest name in our poetry; Scott, with generous appreciation of a genius so alien to his own, called him a 'true Deacon of the craft,' and at one time proposed editing his works, a task projected also by Mr. Ruskin, who, putting Shakespeare aside as rather the world's than ours, holds Pope 'to be the most perfect representative we have since Chaucer of the true English mind.' 'Matched on his own ground,' says Mr. Swinburne, 'he never has been nor can be.'

And Mr. Lowell in the same strain observes that 'in his own province he still stands unapproachably alone.'

What then is Pope's ground? What is this province of which he is the sole ruler? To a considerable extent the question has been answered in these pages, but it may be well to sum up with more definiteness what has been already stated.

In poetry Pope takes a first place in the second order of poets. The deficiencies which forbid his entrance into the first rank are obvious.

He cannot sing, he has no ear for the subtlest melodies of verse, he is not a creative poet, and has few of the spirit-stirring thoughts which the n.o.blest poets scatter through their pages with apparent unconsciousness. There are no depths in Pope and there are no heights; he has neither eye for the beauties of Nature, nor ear for her harmonies, and a primrose was no more to him than it was to Peter Bell.

These are defects indeed, but nothing is more unfair says a great French critic than to judge notable minds solely by their defects, and in spite of them Pope's position is so una.s.sailable that the critic must take a contracted view of the poet's art who questions his right to the t.i.tle.

His merits are of a kind not likely to be affected by time; a lively fancy, a power of satire almost unrivalled, and a skill in using words so consummate that there is no poet, excepting Shakespeare, who has left his mark upon the language so strongly. The loss to us if Pope's verse were to become extinct cannot readily be measured. He has said in the best words what we all know and feel, but cannot express, and has made that cla.s.sical which in weaker hands would be commonplace. His sensibility to the claims of his art is exquisite, the adaptation of his style to his subject shows the hand of a master, and if these are not the highest gifts of a poet, they are gifts to which none but a poet can lay claim.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] Some qualification may be made to these statements. Pope took pleasure in landscape gardening on the English plan, as opposed to the formality of the French and Dutch systems, and the design of the Prince of Wales's garden is said to have been copied from the poet's at Twickenham.

[12] Elwin and Courthope's _Pope_, vol. ii. p. 160.

[13] See the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.

[14] Elwin and Courthope's _Pope_, vol. v., p. 195.

[15] 'Lady Mary,' says Byron, 'was greatly to blame in that quarrel for having encouraged Pope.... She should have remembered her own line,

'"He comes too near who comes to be denied."'

[16] _Studies in English Literature_, p. 47.--_Stanford._

[17] Quin (1693-1766) was the famous actor, and Patterson was Thomson's deputy in the surveyor-generals.h.i.+p of the Leeward Isles, and ultimately his successor.

[18] The Earl of Peterborough, the meteor-like brilliancy of whose actions forms one of the most striking chapters in the history of his time.

[19] _Life of Pope_, p. 216.

[20] 'Pope and Swift,' says Dr. Johnson, 'had an unnatural delight in ideas physically impure, such as every other tongue utters with unwillingness, and of which every ear shrinks from the mention.'

[21] Clarendon Press, Oxford.

[22] No doubt many distinguished foreigners who appreciated the beauty of the poem had read it in the original.

[23] Stephen's _Pope_, p. 163.

[24] _Lectures on Art_, p. 70, Oxford.

CHAPTER II.

PRIOR, GAY, YOUNG, BLAIR, THOMSON.

[Sidenote: Matthew Prior (1664-1721).]

The ease with which the Queen Anne wits obtained office and rose to posts of high trust through the pleasant art of verse-making, is conspicuous in the career of Prior. His parents are unknown, the place of his birth is somewhat doubtful, although he is claimed by Wimborne-Minster, in Dorsets.h.i.+re, and the first trustworthy facts recorded of his early career are that he was a Westminster scholar when the famous Dr. Busby, whose discipline was physical as well as mental, presided over the school. His father died, and his mother being no longer able to pay the school fees, Prior was placed with an uncle who kept the Rhenish Wine Tavern in Westminster. His seat was in the bar, and there the Earl of Dorset (1637-1705-6), a small poet, but a generous patron of poets, found the youth reading Horace, and, pleased with his 'parts,' sent him back to Westminster, whence he went up to Cambridge as a scholar at St. John's, the college destined a century later to receive one of the greatest of English poets.

Charles Montague, afterwards Earl of Halifax (1661-1715), the son of a younger son of a n.o.bleman, was also a Westminster scholar. He entered Trinity College in 1679, and like Prior appears to have owed his good fortune to the rhymer's craft. 'At thirty,' writes Lord Macaulay, 'he would gladly have given all his chances in life for a comfortable vicarage and a chaplain's scarf. At thirty-seven he was First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a Regent of the Kingdom.'

The literary history of the Queen Anne age has many a.s.sociations with his name. He proved a liberal patron of the wits, and of Pope among them, by subscribing largely to his _Homer_; but the poet's memory was stronger for imaginary injuries than for real benefits, and because Halifax had patronized Tickell, he figures in the Prologue to the Satires as 'full-blown Bufo, puffed by every quill.'

Prior and Montague began their rhyming career early, and a partners.h.i.+p production, ent.i.tled the _Hind and Panther, transversed to the story of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse_ (1687), a parody of Dryden's famous poem published in the same year, brought both authors into notice. At the age of twenty-six Prior, who had previously obtained a fellows.h.i.+p, was appointed Secretary to the Emba.s.sy at the Hague. After that he rose steadily to eminence, became Secretary of State in Ireland, and was finally appointed Amba.s.sador at the French Court. High office brings its troubles, and in those days was not without its perils. In 1711 Prior was sent secretly to Paris to negotiate a peace, for which, when the Whigs came again into power, he was imprisoned and expected to lose his head. While in prison, where he remained for two years (1715-1717), the poet wrote _Alma_, a humorous and speculative poem on the relations of the soul and body, and when released published his _Poems_ by subscription in a n.o.ble folio, said to be the largest-sized volume in the whole range of English poetry. He gained 4,000 guineas by the publication, and with that sum and an estate purchased for him by Lord Harley, Prior was able to live in comfort. He died in September, 1721, in his fifty-eighth year, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, under a monument for which he had had the vanity to pay five hundred pounds.

The peculiar merit of Prior is better understood in our day than it was in his own. We read his poems solely for the sake of the 'lighter pieces,' which Johnson despised. The poet thought _Solomon_ his best work, but no one who toils through the three books which form that poem is likely to agree with this estimate. Dulness pervades the work like an atmosphere, but it had its admirers in the last century, and among them was John Wesley, who, in reply to Johnson's complaint of its tediousness, said he should as soon think of calling the Second or Sixth aeneid tedious. In the preface to the poem Prior declares that he "had rather be thought a good Englishman than the best poet or greatest scholar that ever wrote," a pa.s.sage which does more honour to the poet than any in the text. A far more popular piece was _Henry and Emma_, which even so fine a judge of poetry as Cowper called 'inimitable.'

Tastes change, let us hope for the better, and possibly none but the greatest poets remain unaffected by time. a.s.suredly Prior does not, and _Henry and Emma_ affords a striking ill.u.s.tration of the contrast between the poetical spirit of Prior's age and that which influences ours. The poem is founded on the fine ballad of the _Nut-Browne Maide_. The story, as originally told, is homely and quaint, written without apparent effort and told in 360 lines. Prior requires considerably more than twice that number, and his maid and her lover, instead of using the simple language befitting the theme, employ the conventional machinery of the age, and bring Jove and Mars, Cupid and Venus upon the scene, with allusions to Marlborough's victories and to 'Anna's wondrous reign.'

_Alma_, a poem written in Hudibrastic verse, which shows that Prior had in a measure caught the vein of Butler, has some couplets familiar in quotations. He won, too, not a little contemporary reputation for his tales in verse, which are singularly coa.r.s.e; but an age that tolerated Mrs. Manley and read the plays and novels of Aphra Behn was not likely to object to the grossness of Prior. Dr. Johnson would not admit that his poems were unfit for a lady's table, and Wesley, who appears to have been strangely oblivious to Prior's moral delinquencies, observes that his tales are the best told of any in the English tongue. Cowper praised him for his 'charming ease,' and this gift enabled him to write some of the most delightful occasional verses produced in the century. There is nothing more exquisite of its kind than his address, _To a Child of Quality_, written when the child was five years old and the poet forty, and one is not surprised to learn that Prior was admired by Thomas Moore, who more than once caught his note. A reader familiar with Moore and ignorant of Prior would without hesitation attribute the following stanzas, from the _Answer to Chloe Jealous_, to the Irish poet:

'The G.o.d of us vers.e.m.e.n (you know, Child), the sun, How after his journeys he sets up his rest; If at morning o'er earth 'tis his fancy to run, At night he declines on his Thetis's breast.

'So when I am wearied with wandering all day, To thee, my delight, in the evening I come; No matter what beauties I saw in my way; They were but my visits, but thou art my home.

'Then finish, dear Cloe, this pastoral war, And let us, like Horace and Lydia, agree; For thou art a girl as much brighter than her As he was a poet sublimer than me.'

"The grammatical lapse in these last two lines," says Mr. Austin Dobson, "perhaps calls for correction, but many readers will probably agree with Moore (_Diary_, November, 1818), 'that it is far prettier as it is.'

'Nothing,' he says truly, 'can be more gracefully light and gallant than this little poem.'"

It was fancy and not imagination which conceived the following lines, but how charming is the fancy! The poem, which is given in a slightly abridged form, is addressed