The Works of Alexander Pope Part 41

Tho come another companye That Lad ydone the treachery, &c.--POPE.

Pope in this paragraph had not only Chaucer in view, but the pa.s.sage of Virgil where he describes the criminals in the infernal regions. The second line of Pope's opening couplet was suggested by Dryden's translation, aeneis, vi. 825:

Expel their parents and usurp the throne.]

[Footnote 119: A glance at the Revolution of 1688.--CROKER.]

[Footnote 120: The scene here changes from the Temple of Fame to that of Rumour, which is almost entirely Chaucer's. The particulars follow:

Tho saw I stonde in a valey, Under the castle faste by A house, that Domus Dedali That Labyrinthus cleped is, Nas made so wonderly I wis, Ne half so queintly ywrought; And evermo, as swift as thought, This queinte house aboute went, That never more stille it stent-- And eke this house hath of entrees As fele of leaves as ben on trees In summer, when they grene ben; And in the roof yet men may sene A thousand holes, and well mo To letten well the soune out go; And by day in every tide Ben all the doores open wide, And by night each one unshet; No porter is there one to let No manner tydings in to pace: Ne never rest is in that place.--POPE.]

[Footnote 121: This thought is transferred thither out of the second book of Fame, where it takes up no less than one hundred and twenty verses, beginning thus:

Geffray, thou wottost well this, &c.--POPE.]

[Footnote 122: From Chaucer:

If that thou Throw on water now a stone, Well wost thou it will make anon A little roundel as a circle, Paraunture broad as a covercle, And right anon thou shalt see wele, That circle will cause another wheel, And that the third, and so forth, brother, Every circle causing other, And multiplying evermoe, Till that it so far ygo That it at bothe brinkes be.

And right thus every word, ywis, That loud or privy y-spoken is, Moveth first an air about, And of this moving, out of doubt, Another air anon is moved, As I have of the water proved That every circle causeth other.

A "covercle" was the cover or lid of a pot.]

[Footnote 123: Dryden's version of Ovid, Met. xii.:

Whence all things, though remote, are viewed around And hither bring their undulating sound.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 124:

Of werres, of peace, of marriages, Of rest, of labour, of voyages, Of abode, of dethe, of life, Of love and hate, accord and strife, Of loss, of lore, and of winnings, Of hele, of sickness, and lessings, Of divers trans.m.u.tations Of estates and eke of regions, Of trust, of drede, of jealousy, Of wit, of winning, of folly, Of good, or bad governement, Of fire, and of divers accident.--POPE.

The dismissal of Lord Oxford, the death of Queen Anne immediately afterwards, on August 1, 1714, and the overthrow of Bolingbroke, were events which had recently happened when Pope published his poem, and there never was a time when "changes in the state," "the falls of favourites," and "old mismanagements" were a more universal topic of conversation.]

[Footnote 125:

But such a grete congregation Of folke as I saw roame about, Some within, and some without.

Was never seen, ne shall be eft-- And every wight that I saw there Rowned everich in others ear A newe tyding privily, Or elles he told it openly Right thus, and said, Knowst not thou That is betide to night now?

No, quoth he, tell me what And then he told him this and that, &c.--POPE.]

[Footnote 126:

Thus north and south Went every tiding fro mouth to mouth, And that encreasing evermo, As fire is wont to quicken and go From a sparkle sp.r.o.ng amiss, Till all the citee brent up is.--POPE.]

[Footnote 127: Dryden, Ovid, Met. xii.:

Fame sits aloft.

In Ovid the scene is laid in the house of Fame. Pope lays it in the house of Rumour, and having left Fame enthroned in her own temple, he now represents her as permanently "sitting aloft" in a totally different edifice.]

[Footnote 128:

And sometime I saw there at once, A lesing and a sad sooth saw That gonnen at adventure draw Out of a window forth to pace-- And no man be he ever so wrothe, Shall have one of these two, but bothe, &c.--POPE.]

[Footnote 129: The hint is taken from a pa.s.sage in another part of the third book, but here more naturally made the conclusion, with the addition of a moral to the whole. In Chaucer, he only answers, "he came to see the place;" and the book ends abruptly, with his being surprized at the sight of a man of great authority, and awaking in a fright.--POPE.

This is an imperfect representation. While Chaucer is standing in the House of Fame, a person goes up to him,

And saide, Friend, what is thy name, Artow come hither to have fame?

The poet disclaims any such intention, and protests that he has no desire that his name should be known to a single soul. He is then asked what he does there, and he replies that he who brought him to the place promised him that he should learn new and wonderful things, in which, he says, he has been disappointed, for he was aware before that people coveted fame, though he was not hitherto acquainted with the dwelling of the G.o.ddess, nor with her appearance and condition. His interrogator answers that he perceives what it is he desires to know, and conducts him to the house of Rumour. There he has revealed to him the falsehood of the world, and especially of pilgrims and pardoners, which was an important doctrine to be inculcated in those days. When the scene has been fully disclosed, "a man of great authority" appears, and the poet starts up from his sleep, by which he seems to intimate that the wise and serious frown upon those who listen to idle tales. His awaking "half afraid," is the result of his

Remembring well what I had seen, And how high and far I had been In my ghost.

Pope, by reserving the inquiry addressed to him for the end of the poem, represents himself as being asked in the temple of Rumour whether he has come there for fame, which, is not more, but much less natural than the arrangement of Chaucer, who supposes the question to be put in the temple of Fame itself. Nor would it have been congenial to Chaucer's modest disposition to make himself the climax of the piece.]

[Footnote 130: Garth, in the preface to his Dispensary: "Reputation of this sort is very hard to be got, and very easy to be lost."--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 131: Cowley's Complaint:

Thou who rewardest but with popular breath And that too after death.--WAKEFIELD.

Pope's moral is inconsistent with the previous tone of his poem. He has not treated the "second life in others' breath" as "vain," but speaks of the position of Homer, Aristotle, &c. in the temple of Fame as though it were a substantial triumph, a real dignity, and a glorious reward. The purport of his piece is to enforce, and not to depreciate, the value of literary renown. His whole life attests that this was his genuine opinion. He was not endowed with the equanimity which neither covets nor despises reputation, and it was pure affectation when he pretended, in the concluding paragraph, that he did not "call for the favours of fame," and that he held posthumous fame, in particular, to be a worthless possession.]

[Footnote 132: Dryden, in Palamon and Arcite, says of women that they

Still follow fortune where she leads the way.]

PASTORALS,

WITH A

DISCOURSE ON PASTORAL.

WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1704.

Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes, Flumina amem, sylvasque, inglorius!--VIRG.

These Pastorals were written at the age of sixteen, and then pa.s.sed through the hands of Mr. Walsh, Mr. Wycherley, G. Granville, afterwards Lord Lansdowne, Sir William Trumbull, Dr. Garth, Lord Halifax, Lord Somers, Mr. Mainwaring, and others. All these gave our author the greatest encouragement, and particularly Mr. Walsh, whom Mr. Dryden, in his postscript to Virgil, calls the best critic of his age. "The author," says he, "seems to have a particular genius for this kind of poetry, and a judgment that much exceeds his years. He has taken very freely from the ancients. But what he has mixed of his own with theirs is no way inferior to what he has taken from them. It is not flattery at all to say that Virgil had written nothing so good at his age. His preface is very judicious and learned." Letter to Mr. Wycherley, Ap.

1705. The Lord Lansdowne, about the same time, mentioning the youth of our poet, says, in a printed letter of the character of Mr. Wycherley, that "if he goes on as he hath begun in the pastoral way, as Virgil first tried his strength, we may hope to see English poetry vie with the Roman." Notwithstanding the early time of their production, the author esteemed these as the most correct in the versification, and musical in the numbers, of all his works. The reason for his labouring them into so much softness, was, doubtless, that this sort of poetry derives almost its whole beauty from a natural ease of thought and smoothness of verse: whereas that of most other kinds consist in the strength and fulness of both. In a letter of his to Mr. Walsh about this time, we find an enumeration of several niceties in versification, which perhaps have never been strictly observed in any English poem, except in these Pastorals. They were not printed till 1709.--POPE.

The sycophancy of A. Philips, who had prejudiced Mr. Addison against Pope, occasioned those papers[1] in the Guardian, written by the latter, in which there is an ironical preference given to the Pastorals of Philips above his own, in order to support the profound judgment of those who could not distinguish between the rural and the rustic, and on that account condemned the Pastorals of Pope for wanting simplicity.