English Literature for Boys and Girls Part 62

A mournful glance Sir Fopling upwards cast, 'Those eyes were made so killing,' was his last."

Belinda, however, at length disarmed the Baron with a pinch of snuff, and threatened his life with a hair pin. And so the battle ends. But alas!--

"The lock, obtained with guilt and kept with pain, In ev'ry place is sought, but sought in vain."

During the fight it has been caught up to the skies--

"A sudden star, it shot through liquid air, And drew behind a radiant trail of hair."

Thus, says the poet, Belinda has no longer need to mourn her lost lock, for it will be famous to the end of time as a bright star among the stars--

"Then cease, bright nymph! to mourn thy ravished hair, Which adds new glory to the starry sphere!

Not all the tresses that fair head can boast, Shall draw such envy as the lock you lost.

For after all the murders of your eye, When, after millions slain, yourself shall die; When those fair suns shall set, as set they must, And all those tresses shall be laid in dust, This lock the Muse shall consecrate to fame, And midst the stars inscribe Belinda's name."

When Pope first published this poem there was nothing about fairies in it. Afterwards he thought of the fairies, but Addison advised him not to alter the poem, as it was so delightful as it was. Pope, however, did not take the advice, but added the fairy part, thereby greatly improving the poem. This caused a quarrel with Addison, for Pope thought he had given him bad advice through jealousy. A little later this quarrel was made much worse. Pope translated and published a version of the Iliad, and at the same time a friend of Addison did so too. This made Pope bitterly angry, for he believed that the translation was Addison's own and that he had published it to injure the sale of his. From this you see how easily Pope's anger and jealousy were aroused, and will not wonder that his life was a long record of quarrels.

Pope need not have been jealous of Addison's friend, for his own translation of Homer was a great success, and people soon forgot the other. He translated not only the Iliad, but with the help of two lesser poets the Odyssey also. Both poems were done in the fas.h.i.+onable heroic couplet, and Pope made so much money by them that he was able to live in comfort ever after. And it is interesting to remember that Pope was the first poet who was able to live in comfort entirely on what he made by his writing.

Pope now took a house at Twickenham, and there he spent many happy hours planning and laying out his garden, and building a grotto with sh.e.l.ls and stones and bits of looking-gla.s.s. The house has long ago been pulled down and the garden altered, but the grotto still remains, a sight for the curious.

It has been said that to write in the heroic couplet "is an art as mechanical as that of mending a kettle or shoeing a horse, and may be learned by any human being who has sense enough to learn anything."* And although this is not all true, it is so far true that it is almost impossible to tell which books of the Odyssey were written by Pope, and which by the men who helped him. But, taken as a whole, the Odyssey is not so good as the Iliad.

Scholars tell us that in neither the one nor the other is the feeling of the original poetry kept. Pope did not know enough Greek to enter into the spirit of it, and he worked mostly from translation. Even had he been able to enter into the true spirit he would have found it hard to keep that spirit in his translation, using as he did the artificial heroic couplet. For Homer's poetry is not artificial, but simple and natural like our own early poetry. "A pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer," said a friend** when he read it, and his judgment is still for the most part the judgment of to-day.

*Macaulay.

**Bentley.

It was after he had finished the Odyssey that Pope wrote his most famous satire, called the Dunciad. In this he insulted and held up to ridicule all stupid or dull authors, all dunces, and all those whom he considered his enemies. It is very clever, but a poem full of malice and hatred does not make very pleasant reading. For most of us, too, the interest it had has vanished, as many of the people at whom Pope levied his malice are forgotten, or only remembered because he made them famous by adding their names to his roll of dunces. But in Pope's own day the Dunciad called forth cries of anger and revenge from the victims, and involved the author in still more quarrels.

Pope wrote many more poems, the chief being the Essay on Criticism and the Essay on Man. But his translations of Homer and the Rape of the Lock are those you will like best in the meantime. As a whole Pope is perhaps not much read now, yet many of his lines have become household words, and when you come to read him you will be surprised to find how many familiar quotations are taken from his poems. Perhaps no one of our poets except Shakespeare is more quoted. And yet he seldom says anything which touches the heart. When we enjoy his poetry we enjoy it with the brain. It gives us pleasure rather as the glitter of a diamond than as the perfume of a rose.

In spite of his crooked, sickly little body Pope lived to be fifty-six, and one evening in May 1744 he died peacefully in his home at Twickenham, and was buried in the church there, near the monument which he had put up to the memory of his father and mother.

There is so much disagreeable and mean in Pope that we are apt to lose sight of what was good in him altogether. We have to remind ourselves that he was a good and affectionate son, and that he was loving to the friends with whom he did not quarrel. Yet these can hardly be counted as great merits. Perhaps his greatest merit is that he kept his independence in an age when writers fawned upon patrons or accepted bribes from Whig or Tory.

Pope held on his own way, looking for favors neither from one side nor from the other. And when we think of his frail little body, this st.u.r.dy independence of mind is all the more wonderful.

From Pope we date the beginning of the time when a writer could live honorable by his pen, and had not need to flatter a patron, or sell his genius to politics or party. But Pope stood alone in this independence, and he never had to fight for it. A happy chance, we might say, made him free. For while his brother writers all around him were still held in the chains of patronage, Pope having more money than some did not need to bow to it, and having less greed than others did not choose to bow to it, in order to add to his wealth. And in the following chapter we come to another man who in the next generation fought for freedom, won it, and thereby helped to free others. This man was the famous Dr. Samuel Johnson.

BOOKS TO READ

Pope's Iliad, edited by A. J. Church. Pope's Odyssey, edited by A. J. Church.

NOTE.--As an introduction to Pope's Homer the following books may be read:--

Stories from the Iliad, by Jeanie Lang. Stories from the Odyssey, by Jeannie Lang. The Children's Iliad, by A. J. Church.

The Children's Odyssey, by A. J. Church.

Chapter LXVIII JOHNSON--DAYS OF STRUGGLE

SAMUEL JOHNSON was the son of a country bookseller, and he was born at Lichfield in 1709. He was a big, strong boy, but he suffered from a dreadful disease, known then as the King's Evil.

It left scars upon his good-looking face, and nearly robbed him of his eyesight. In those days people still believed that this dreadful disease would be cured if the person suffering from it was touched by a royal hand. So when he was two, little Samuel was taken to London by his father and mother, and there he was "touched" by Queen Anne. Samuel had a wonderful memory, and although he had been so young at the time, all his life after he kept a kind of awed remembrance of a stately lady who wore a long black hood and sparkling diamonds. The touch of the Queen's soft white hand did the poor little sick child no good, and it is quaint to remember that the great learned doctor thought it might be because he had been touched by the wrong royal hand. He might have been cured perhaps had he been taken to Rome and touched by the hand of a Stuart. For Johnson was a Tory, and all his life he remained at heart a Jacobite.

At school Samuel learned easily and read greedily all kinds of books. He loved poetry most, and read Shakespeare when he was so young that he was frightened at finding himself alone while reading about the ghost in Hamlet. Yet he was idle at his tasks and had not altogether an easy time, for when asked long years after how he became such a splendid Latin scholar, he replied, "My master whipt me very well, without that, sir, I should have done nothing."

Samuel learned so easily that, though he was idle, he knew more than any of the other boys. He ruled them too. Three of them used to come every morning to carry their stout comrade to school. Johnson mounted on the back of one, and the other two supported him, one on each side. In winter when he was too lazy to skate or slide himself they pulled him about on the ice by a garter tied round his waist. Thus early did Johnson show his power over his fellows.

At sixteen Samuel left school, and for two years idled about his father's shop, reading everything that came in his way. He devoured books. He did not read them carefully, but quickly, tearing the heart out of them. He cared for nothing else but reading, and once when his father was ill and unable to attend to his bookstall, he asked his son to do it for him. Samuel refused. But the memory of his disobedience and unkindliness stayed with him, and more than fifty years after, as an old and worn man, he stood bare-headed in the wind and rain for an hour in the market-place, upon the spot where his father's stall had stood. This he did as a penance for that one act of disobedience.

Johnson's father was a bookworm, like his son, rather than a tradesman. He knew and loved his books, but he made little money by them. A student himself, he was proud of his studious boy, and wanted to send him to college. But he was miserably poor and could not afford it. A well-off friend, however, offered to help, and so at eighteen Samuel went to Oxford.

Here he remained three years. Those years were not altogether happy ones, for Johnson's huge ungainly figure, and shabby, patched clothes were matters for laughter among his fellow- students. He became a sloven in his dress. His gown was tattered and his linen dirty, and his toes showed through his boots. Yet when some one, meaning no doubt to be kind, placed a new pair at his door, he kicked them away in anger. He would not stoop to accept charity. But in spite of his poverty and shabby clothes, he was a leader at college as he had been at school, and might often be seen at his college gates with a crowd of young men round him, "entertaining them with wit and keeping them from their studies."*

*Boswell.

After remaining about three years at college, Johnson left without taking a degree. Perhaps poverty had something to do with that. At any rate, with a great deal of strange, unordered learning and no degree, and with his fortune still to make, Samuel returned to his poverty-stricken home. There in a few months the father died, leaving to his son an inheritance of forty pounds.

With forty pounds not much is to be done, and Samuel became an usher, or under-master in a school. He was little fitted to teach, and the months which followed were to him a torture, and all his life after he looked back on them with something of horror.

After a few months, he left the school where he had been so unhappy, and went to Birmingham to be near an old schoolfellow.

Here he managed to live somehow, doing odd bits of writing, and here he met the lady who became his wife.

Johnson was now twenty-five and a strange-looking figure. He was tall and lank, and his huge bones seemed to start out of his lean body. His face was deeply marked with scars, and although he was very near-sighted, his gray eyes were bright and wild, so wild at times that they frightened those upon whom they were turned. He wore his own hair, which was coa.r.s.e and straight, and in an age when every man wore a wig this made him look absurd. He had a trick of making queer gestures with hands and feet. He would shake his head and roll himself about, and would mutter to himself until strangers though that he was an idiot.

And this queer genius fell in love with a widow lady more than twenty years older than himself. She, we are told, was coa.r.s.e, fat, and unlovely, but she was not without brains, for she saw beneath the strange outside of her young lover. "This is the most sensible man that I ever saw in my life," she said, after talking with him. So this strange couple married. "Sir," said Johnson afterwards, "It was a love-marriage on both sides." And there can be no doubt that Samuel loved his wife devotedly while she lived, and treasured her memory tenderly after her death.

Mrs. Johnson had a little money, and so Samuel returned to his native town and there opened a school. An advertis.e.m.e.nt appeared in the papers, "At Edial, near Lichfield, in Staffords.h.i.+re, young gentlemen are boarded and taught the Latin and Greek languages, by Samuel Johnson." But Johnson was quite unfitted to be a teacher, and the school did not prosper. "His schoolroom," says another writer, "must have resembled an ogre's den," and only two or three boys came to it. Among them was David Garrick, who afterwards became a famous actor and amused the world by imitating his friend and old schoolmaster, the great Sam, as well as his elderly wife.

After struggling with his school for more than a year, Johnson resolved to give it up and go to London, there to seek his fortune. Leaving his wife at Lichfield, he set off with his friend and pupil David Garrick, as he afterwards said, "With twopence halfpenny in my pocket, and thou, Davy, with three halfpence in thine."

The days of the later Stuarts and the first of the Georges were the great days of patronage. When a writer of genius appeared, n.o.blemen and others, who were powerful and wealthy, were eager to become his patron, and have his books dedicated to them. So although the dunces among writers remained terribly poor, almost every man of genius was sure of a comfortable life. But although he gained this by his writing, it was not because the people liked his books, but because one man liked them or was eager to have his name upon them, and therefore became his patron. The patron, then, either himself helped his pet writer, or got for him some government employment. After a time this fas.h.i.+on ceased, and instead of taking his book to a patron, a writer took it to a bookseller, and sold it to him for as much money as he could. And so began the modern way of publis.h.i.+ng books.

But when Johnson came to London to try his fortune as a writer, it was just the time between. The patron had not quite vanished, the bookseller had not yet taken his place. Never had writing been more badly paid, never had it been more difficult to make a living by it. "The trade of author was at about one of its lowest ebbs when Johnson embarked on it."*

*Carlyle.

Johnson had brought with him to London a tragedy more than half written, but when he took it to the booksellers they showed no eagerness to publish it, or indeed anything else that he might write. Looking at him they saw no genius, but only a huge and uncouth country youth. One bookseller, seeing his great body, advised him rather to try his luck as a porter than as a writer.

But, in spite of rebuffs and disappointments, Johnson would not give in. When he had money enough he lived in mean lodgings, when he had none, hungry, ragged, and cold, he roamed about the streets, making friends with other strange, forlorn men of genius, and sharing their miseries.

But if Johnson starved he never cringed, and once when a bookseller spoke rudely to him he knocked him down with one of his own books. A beggar or not, Johnson demanded the respect due to a man. At school and college he had dominated his fellows, he dominated now. But the need of fighting for respect made him rough. And ever after his manner with friend and foe alike was rude and brusque.

The misery of this time was such that long years after Johnson burst into tears at the memory of it. But it did not conquer him, he conquered it. He got work to do at last, and became one of the first newspaper reporters.