The Works of Alexander Pope Part 43

Pope quickly ripened into genius, and reigned without a compet.i.tor. The exaggerated panegyrics of the Guardian could not confer a reputation upon Philips he did not deserve, and Pope derived none of his celebrity from the gross expedient of exalting himself, and decrying his antagonist. There is nothing which is less affected by unjust praise and unjust detraction than an author's works. They are there to speak for themselves, and no amount of petty artifices can long raise them higher or sink them lower than they merit.

Pope was a contributor to the Guardian, and on cordial terms with the editor, but he could not ask to have a paper inserted in which he had drawn a comparison between his own Pastorals and those of his rival, and awarded himself the palm. He therefore sent the criticism anonymously, and Steele, as we are told by Warburton, not discovering that the praise of Philips and the censure of Pope were both ironical, showed the ma.n.u.script to the latter, and a.s.sured him that he would "never publish any paper where one of the club was complimented at the expense of another." His ingenuous ally affected magnanimity, and prevailed upon Steele to print the essay. The irony which could not be detected by the wits at b.u.t.ton's might well escape less cultivated minds. Ayre, in his Memoirs of Pope, in 1745, and Dilworth, in 1760, both believed that the criticism was to be interpreted literally, that Steele was the author of it, and that it was dictated by friends.h.i.+p for Philips. Small as was the ability of these biographers, they may be supposed to have shared the common opinion. This continued to be the accepted doctrine in the next generation; and the celebrated circle in which Hannah More lived were unanimous in holding that the essay was not satirical. "The whole criticism," she wrote August 4, 1783, "appears to me a burlesque, but I have some reason to think I am in the wrong, as I have all the world against me. That a writer of so pure a taste could be in earnest when he talks of the elegance of Diggon Davy, and exalts all that trash of Philips's, whose simplicity is silliness, I cannot bring myself to believe." She found it still more difficult to believe that the author could be serious in a.s.serting that Hobbinol and Lobbin are names agreeable to the delicacy of an English ear.[25] Hannah More judged of Philips by the wretched extracts in the Guardian. Her accomplished friends could hardly have admired them; and it must have been for a different reason that the purpose of the essay was misunderstood. Warton says that the misapprehension arose from "the skill with which the irony was conducted." It would be more natural to infer that the execution was defective when the vast majority of literary men mistook the design. The satire, in fact, is imperfectly sustained, and pa.s.sages, which the author intended for irony, appeared to the reader to be plain common sense. "Mr. Pope," he says of himself, "hath fallen into the same error with Virgil. His names are borrowed from Theocritus and Virgil, which are improper to the scenes of his Pastorals. He introduces Daphnis, Alexis, and Thyrsis on British plains, as Virgil had done before him on the Mantuan." Habit had reconciled Pope to the affectation of calling English shepherds Daphnis and Thyrsis, but "the names," as De Quincey says, "are rank with childishness," and the public, who felt the practice to be absurd, concluded that the censure was real. "It may,"

said Pope, "be observed, as a farther beauty of this pastoral, that the words nymph, dryad, naiad, faun, Cupid, or satyr, are not once mentioned through the whole," which was a sneer at Addison's commendation of Philips for rejecting those dreary nonent.i.ties; but the public, who had been nauseated with them, could not detect a covert sarcasm in the repet.i.tion of the praise by the writer in the Guardian. The circ.u.mstance which seemed to Warton to render the irony transparent was the remark, that "Philips had with great judgment described wolves in England," but the ridicule was based upon ignorance, and must have been lost upon every one who was aware that wolves abounded in the antique period to which the pastorals referred. Bowles, who knew that the paper was ironical, yet imagined that Pope was serious in the opening portion, where it is a.s.serted that Virgil has not above a couple of "true pastorals," and that Theocritus has scarcely more. This part, however, of the essay was in the same sarcastic vein with the rest. The previous critic in the Guardian had laid down the rule that a pastoral should reflect "the golden age of innocence," and Pope, to deprive Philips of the benefit of the definition, endeavoured to show that Theocritus and Virgil had hardly ever conformed to it. He did not mean seriously to admit that his compet.i.tor was a more genuine pastoral poet than Virgil and Theocritus. His object was to throw ridicule on the definition itself, albeit he adopted it in his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry when he was no longer engaged in disparaging Philips.

Nothing can be clearer than that Pope was instigated to write the essay in the Guardian by his jealousy of the praise which had been bestowed upon his rival. The course he took was discreditable, and Warburton, without attempting a direct apology, pretends that the incident which influenced the poet was the misrepresentations made of him to Addison by Philips. Ruffhead adds that the calumny consisted in the a.s.sertion that Pope was "engaged in the intrigues of the tory ministry." This would be a good reason for his exposing the mis-statement, but would be a poor excuse for his writing an anonymous attack upon Philips's Pastorals, and a panegyric upon his own. The defence, which would be inadequate if it was true, is indubitably incorrect. The account of Warburton did not appear till Philips was dead. Pope, while Philips was living, published an account, in the shape of a letter to Caryll, the date and contents of which prove that Philips did not bring his charge against Pope till a full year after the paper had been printed in the Guardian.[26] The poet adds that when they meet he will inform Caryll "of the secret grounds of Philips's malignity," and Warburton himself subjoins in a note "These grounds were Mr. Pope's writing the ironical comparison between his own and Philips's Pastorals." The strong presumption from the nature of the case that Pope was actuated by literary envy is thus confirmed. The criticism in the Guardian was not provoked by the malignity of Philips, but the bitterness of Philips was the consequence of the criticism. In 1790, Mr. J. C. Walker, the Italian scholar, sent to the Gentleman's Magazine an alleged remark of Philips to the same effect. "When the comparison," says Mr. Walker, "between the Pastorals of Pope and Philips appeared, Philips was secretary to Primate Boulter, and then in Ireland. Dining one day with the officers of the Prerogative Court, the comparison became the subject of conversation, and Philips said he knew it was written by Pope, adding, 'I wonder why the little crooked b.a.s.t.a.r.d should attack me, who never offended him either in word or deed?' This I had from a gentleman who was present."[27] If the conversation ever occurred, the gentleman was mistaken in supposing that the criticism was recent, for the paper in the Guardian came out in 1713, and it was not till more than ten years afterwards that Philips went with Archbishop Boulter to Ireland. The story is unnecessary to prove that Pope was the aggressor, which is sufficiently evident from independent testimony.

Unhappily for himself, he began at the outset of his career to stir up those enmities which were the torment of his existence. By his attack upon Dennis, in the Essay on Criticism, he invited the scurrility of that rabid pamphleteer, and by what Bowles calls his "unmanly hostility"

to Philips he was reduced to the shame of being scared away from b.u.t.ton's by the no less unmanly retaliation of his victim, who, at some period of the quarrel, hung up a birch, and declared that he would use it on "his rival Arcadian," if he showed his face in the coffee-room.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: There was only one paper.]

[Footnote 2: Warburton implies that Addison's remark to Pope was made immediately after the essay appeared in the Guardian, in which case Pope could have lost no time in avowing that he was the author of the criticism when once it was in print, for Addison had no suspicion of him from internal evidence. "He did not," says Spence, "discover Mr. Pope's style in the letter on Pastorals, which he published in the Guardian; but then that was a disguised style."]

[Footnote 3: The effect of reality and truth became conspicuous, even when the intention was to show them grovelling and degraded. Gay's pastorals became popular, and were read with delight as just representations of rural manners and occupations, by those who had no interest in the rivalry of the poets, nor knowledge of the critical dispute.--JOHNSON.]

[Footnote 4: Warton was master of Winchester school.]

[Footnote 5: But if Pope had no invention, and had exhibited in his Pastorals no new or striking images, how could his example have led the way to others, "in point of genius and imagination," whatever it might have done in point of correctness?--ROSCOE.]

[Footnote 6: They are not coupled but contra-distinguished, and surely the poet might draw a contrast from Greece without being chargeable with a faulty mixture of British and Grecian ideas.--RUFFHEAD.]

[Footnote 7: That such causes of complaint will more frequently occur in the Grecian climate is unquestionable; but is it necessary to make a complaint of this kind consistent that every day should be a dog-day?

The British shepherd might very consistently describe what he often felt, and we have days in England which might make even a Grecian faint.--RUFFHEAD.]

[Footnote 8: "New sentiments and new images," says Johnson, in his Life of Pope, "others may produce; but to attempt any further improvement of versification will be dangerous. Art and diligence have done their best, and what shall be added will be the effort of tedious toil and needless curiosity."]

[Footnote 9: Works of Lord Lansdowne, vol. ii. p. 113.]

[Footnote 10: De Quincey's Works, vol. xv. p. 114.]

[Footnote 11: Singer's Spence, p. 162.]

[Footnote 12: Spence, p. 211.]

[Footnote 13: Works of Lady Mary Wortley, ed. Thomas, vol. i. p. 166.]

[Footnote 14: Dryden, Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern.]

[Footnote 15: Spence, p. 236.]

[Footnote 16: Spence, p. 212.]

[Footnote 17: Oeuvres, ed. Beuchot, tom. x.x.xvii. p. 258.]

[Footnote 18: Lives of the Poets, ed. Cunningham, vol. iii. p. 136. The principle which Johnson derided in his Life of Pope he had upheld in No.

86 of the Rambler: "We are soon wearied with the perpetual recurrence of the same cadence. Necessity has therefore enforced the mixed measure, in which some variation of the accents is allowed. This, though it always injures the harmony of the line considered by itself, yet compensates the loss by relieving us from the continual tyranny of the same sound, and makes us more sensible of the harmony of the pure measure."]

[Footnote 19: Elements of Criticism, 6th ed. vol. ii. p. 143, 155.]

[Footnote 20: Gray's Works, ed. Mitford, vol. v. p. 303.]

[Footnote 21: Trapp's Virgil, vol. i. p. lxxix.]

[Footnote 22: Lives of the Poets, vol. iii. p. 136.]

[Footnote 23: Guardian, No. 30, April 15, 1713.]

[Footnote 24: Guardian, No. 40, April 27, 1713.]

[Footnote 25: Life of Hannah More, vol. i. p. 301.]

[Footnote 26: Pope to Caryll, June 8, 1714.]

[Footnote 27: Nichols, Ill.u.s.trations of Lit. Hist. vol. vii. 713.]

A DISCOURSE

ON

PASTORAL POETRY.[1]

There are not, I believe, a greater number of any sort of verses than of those which are called pastorals; nor a smaller, than of those which are truly so. It therefore seems necessary to give some account of this kind of poem; and it is my design to comprise in this short paper the substance of those numerous dissertations the critics have made on the subject, without omitting any of their rules in my own favour. You will also find some points reconciled, about which they seem to differ, and a few remarks, which, I think, have escaped their observation.

The original of poetry is ascribed to that age which succeeded the creation of the world: and as the keeping of flocks seems to have been the first employment of mankind, the most ancient sort of poetry was probably pastoral.[2] It is natural to imagine, that the leisure of those ancient shepherds admitting and inviting some diversion, none was so proper to that solitary and sedentary life as singing; and that in their songs they took occasion to celebrate their own felicity. From hence a poem was invented, and afterwards improved to a perfect image of that happy time; which, by giving us an esteem for the virtues of a former age, might recommend them to the present. And since the life of shepherds was attended with more tranquillity than any other rural employment, the poets chose to introduce their persons, from whom it received the name of pastoral.

A pastoral is an imitation of the action of a shepherd, or one considered under that character. The form of this imitation is dramatic, or narrative, or mixed of both[3]; the fable simple; the manners not too polite nor too rustic: the thoughts are plain, yet admit a little quickness and pa.s.sion, but that short and flowing: the expression humble, yet as pure as the language will afford; neat, but not florid; easy, and yet lively. In short, the fable, manners, thoughts, and expressions are full of the greatest simplicity in nature.

The complete character of this poem consists in simplicity[4], brevity, and delicacy; the two first of which render an eclogue natural, and the last delightful.

If we would copy nature, it may be useful to take this idea along with us, that pastoral is an image of what they call the golden age. So that we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to have been; when the best of men followed the employment.[5] To carry this resemblance yet further, it would not be amiss to give these shepherds some skill in astronomy, as far as it may be useful to that sort of life. And an air of piety to the G.o.ds should s.h.i.+ne through the poem, which so visibly appears in all the works of antiquity; and it ought to preserve some relish of the old way of writing; the connection should be loose, the narrations and descriptions short,[6] and the periods concise. Yet it is not sufficient, that the sentences only be brief, the whole eclogue should be so too. For we cannot suppose poetry in those days to have been the business of men, but their recreation at vacant hours.[7]

But with respect to the present age, nothing more conduces to make these composures natural, than when some knowledge in rural affairs is discovered.[8] This may be made to appear rather done by chance than on design, and sometimes is best shown by inference; lest by too much study to seem natural, we destroy that easy simplicity from whence arises the delight. For what is inviting in this sort of poetry, as Fontenelle observes, proceeds not so much from the idea of that business, as of the tranquillity of a country life.

We must therefore use some illusion to render a pastoral delightful; and this consists in exposing the best side only of a shepherd's life, and in concealing its miseries.[9] Nor is it enough to introduce shepherds discoursing together in a natural way: but a regard must be had to the subject, that it contain some particular beauty in itself, and that it be different in every eclogue. Besides, in each of them a designed scene or prospect is to be presented to our view, which should likewise have its variety.[10] This variety is obtained in a great degree by frequent comparisons, drawn from the most agreeable objects of the country; by interrogations to things inanimate; by beautiful digressions, but those short; sometimes by insisting a little on circ.u.mstances; and lastly, by elegant turns on the words, which render the numbers extremely sweet and pleasing. As for the numbers themselves, though they are properly of the heroic measure, they should be the smoothest, the most easy and flowing imaginable.

It is by rules like these that we ought to judge of pastoral. And since the instructions given for any art are to be delivered as that art is in perfection, they must of necessity be derived from those in whom it is acknowledged so to be. It is therefore from the practice of Theocritus and Virgil (the only undisputed authors of pastoral) that the critics have drawn the foregoing notions concerning it.

Theocritus excels all others in nature and simplicity. The subjects of his Idyllia are purely pastoral; but he is not so exact in his persons, having introduced reapers and fishermen[11] as well as shepherds.[12]

He is apt to be too long in his descriptions, of which that of the cup in the first pastoral is a remarkable instance.[13] In the manners he seems a little defective, for his swains are sometimes abusive and immodest, and perhaps too much inclining to rusticity; for instance, in his fourth and fifth Idyllia. But it is enough that all others learnt their excellencies from him, and that his dialect alone has a secret charm in it, which no other could ever attain.

Virgil, who copies Theocritus, refines upon his original;[14] and in all points, where judgment is princ.i.p.ally concerned, he is much superior to his master. Though some of his subjects are not pastoral in themselves, but only seem to be such, they have a wonderful variety in them,[15]

which the Greek was a stranger to.[16] He exceeds him in regularity and brevity, and falls short of him in nothing but simplicity and propriety of style; the first of which perhaps was the fault of his age, and the last of his language.

Among the moderns, their success has been greatest who have most endeavoured to make these ancients their pattern. The most considerable genius appears in the famous Ta.s.so, and our Spenser. Ta.s.so in his Aminta has far excelled all the pastoral writers, as in his Gierusalemme he has outdone the epic poets of his country. But as this piece seems to have been the original of a new sort of poem, the pastoral comedy, in Italy, it cannot so well be considered as a copy of the ancients.[17] Spenser's Calendar, in Mr. Dryden's opinion, is the most complete work of this kind which any nation has produced ever since the time of Virgil.[18]