The Works of Alexander Pope Part 65

It is an excellent remark of Bowles that there are some ideas which will only just bear touching. The earliest poems were sung, and singing became synonymous with poetical composition, but when a phrase, which is now a mere figure of speech, is expanded, and the groves are said to rejoice, and the forests to ring with the singing of Granville, the predominant effect produced by the metaphor is a sense of its falsity and grotesqueness. The picture called up is not that of a poet, but of a half-crazed opera singer. This sickly vein of counterfeit pastoral is continued, and we are told that the groves of Windsor are filled with the name of Mira, the subject of Lord Lansdowne's amatory verses, and that the Cupids tuned the lover's lyre in the shades.

The lines on Lord Lansdowne offend the more from the fulsomeness of the adulation. Pope said that "flattery turned his stomach,"[24] which meant that he could not endure his own vices in other people. He had emphatically satirised the sycophancy which estimated literary works by the rank of the author:

What woful stuff this madrigal would be In some starved hackney sonneteer, or me!

But let a lord once own the happy lines, How the wit brightens! how the style refines!

Before his sacred name flies ev'ry fault, And each exalted stanza teems with thought.[25]

The "sacred name" of Lansdowne imparted genius to verse which would have been "woful stuff" in Dennis or Welsted. When Pope, in later years, called him "Granville the polite" he characterised him correctly; when, in Windsor Forest, he exalted him to the rank of a transcendent poet, he said what he could not believe. He outraged candour in prose as well as in verse. He wrote a sycophantic letter to Lord Lansdowne, boasting his freedom from the insincerity of his "fellow scribblers" who composed panegyrics "at random, and persuaded the next vain creature they could find that it was his own likeness." Pope vowed he had erred in the opposite direction, and had forborne to praise Lord Lansdowne up to the height of his deserts out of deference to his modesty. "Whereas others are offended if they have not more than justice done them, you would be displeased if you had so much. Therefore I may safely do you as much injury in my word as you do yourself in your own thoughts. I am so vain as to think I have shown you a favour in sparing your modesty, and you cannot but make me some return for prejudicing the truth to gratify you."[26] Here was triple incense,--the original adulation, the protestation that it was inadequate, and the pretence that Lord Lansdowne, a man noted for vanity, was too modest to endure merited praise. Pope spoke more truth than he intended when he said that he had "prejudiced truth to gratify him."

"Who now reads Cowley?" asked Pope in 1737.[27] The panegyric in Windsor Forest was an anachronism, and he might have asked the same question in 1713. Never was an equal reputation more ephemeral. While Cowley lived, and for a few years afterwards, the most cultivated minds in the kingdom called him the "great Cowley," the "incomparable Cowley," the "divine Cowley." When he died, Denham said that Death had

Plucked the fairest, sweetest flow'r That in the Muses' garden grew.

The herd of readers vied with men of letters in applauding him, as was shown by the sale of his works, and is implied in the couplet of Oldham:

One likes my verses, and commends each line, And swears that Cowley's are but dull to mine.[28]

The wonder is not that he lost his pre-eminence, but that he ever obtained it. His poetry is a puzzle from its contradictory qualities.

Some of his pieces have a gay facility which had not hitherto been rivalled, and the greater part are harsh, heavy and obscure. He loved to search for remote a.n.a.logies, and his profusion of far-fetched similes are constantly of a kind which debase the subject they are intended to elevate and adorn. His language is incessantly pitched in a high, heroic key, and then sinks in the same, or the succeeding sentence, into the tamest, meanest phrases of colloquial prose. His verse in entire poems, as well as in single lilies and occasional pa.s.sages, is remarkable for its tripping ease, and is more often rugged to such a degree that it is incredible how it could pa.s.s with him for verse at all. The faulty side in him predominates, and the general impression he leaves is that of dullness, laboured and negligent by turns. He did not owe the whole of his popularity to his real abilities, and the bad taste of his age. He was a conspicuous adherent of the Stuarts, and the cavaliers adopted his works out of compliment to his politics. The grand funeral procession, commemorated in Windsor Forest, was a tribute paid to him by a party, because he united the fame of a forward royalist to the celebrity of an author. In a generation when authors and royalists were both dissolute, his writings had at least the merit of being untainted by the prevailing vice. Pope, describing the infidelity and debauchery of the Restoration era, exclaims,

Unhappy Dryden! in all Charles's days, Roscommon only boasts unspotted bays.[29]

He might have remembered Milton if he overlooked Cowley, who was nevertheless a far greater poet than Roscommon. The one had gleams of genius, and the other had none. The contemporaries of Cowley had not been blind to the moral merits of his productions. "I cannot," says Sir John Denham, "but mention with honour my friend Mr. Cowley, who was the first who of late offered to redeem poesy from that slavery wherein this depraved age has prost.i.tuted her to all imaginable uncleanness."[30] His request in his will, that his compositions, printed and ma.n.u.script, should be collected by Dr. Sprat, was accompanied by a clause "beseeching him not to let any pa.s.s (if anything of that kind has escaped my pen) which may give the least offence in point of religion and good manners." His life was in keeping with his writings. Evelyn calls him that "incomparable poet, and virtuous man;" and Pepys heard Dr. Ward, the bishop of Winchester, and Dr. Bates, the well-known puritan, "mightily lamenting his death, as the best poet of our nation and as good a man."[31] The king was pleased to add his testimony, worthless if it had stood alone, and declared "that Mr. Cowley had not left a better man behind him in England."[32]

"In Windsor Forest," says Bowles, "there is description, incident, and history." A few remarks may still be made on it under each of these heads. Wordsworth a.s.signed to it the distinction, in conjunction with Lady Winchelsea's Nocturnal Reverie, of containing the only "new images of external nature" to be found "in the poetry of the period intervening between Paradise Lost and the Seasons."[33] He limited the praise to "a pa.s.sage or two," and does not particularise the pa.s.sages to which he alluded. He must chiefly have referred to the lines from ver. 111 to ver. 146; for the other happy "images of external nature" are borrowed.

Pope had but a faint perception of latent and subtle beauties, and he usually kept to those general appearances which are obvious to all the world. His trees cast a shade, his streams murmur, his heath is purple, his harvests are yellow, and his skies blue. Living in the midst of English peasants he shows less familiarity with rural character than with rural scenes. Neither in his verse, nor his letters, is there anything to indicate that he had mixed, like Thomson, Cowper, and Wordsworth, with the cottagers around him, or had divined the n.o.ble qualities which are masked by a rustic exterior. His sympathies were contracted, and strange to say there is not one word in his voluminous writings on human kind which denotes that he had felt in the smallest degree the loveliness of children. His main interest was in men and women, whose names, for good or evil, were before the world, and in speaking of them he dwelt princ.i.p.ally upon their foibles and misdeeds.

The censure of Warton is valid when he complains that Pope's account of field sports is deficient in characteristic details. He found a stag-chase in Cooper's Hill, which determined him to extend, while ho imitated, the plan of his original, and introduce hunting, fis.h.i.+ng, shooting, and netting into Windsor Forest, though he was not a sportsman. The objection that his stag-chase is not as circ.u.mstantial as that of Somerville, is fairly answered by Johnson's remark, that the chase was the main subject of Somerville, and is only subsidiary with Pope. More, nevertheless, was required than a description of the impatience and galloping of the horses, and of the eagerness of the riders. Of this single topic one half was a translation from Statius.

The fis.h.i.+ng and shooting are superior to the hunt. The particulars are meagre, but there is mastery in the mode of representing them. The dying pheasant is painted in language as rich as its plumage, and the doves, the lapwing, the lark, and the wintry landscape, could not have been brought more vividly before the mind, or in fewer words. A gentle pathos intermingles with the whole. The portrait of the angler would have been perfect, in the single circ.u.mstance to which it is confined, if Pope had not said of him, "he hopes the scaly breed." Wakefield observed that "hope," used as an active verb, was intolerably affected, and he might have extended the remark to the use of "scaly breed" for fish.

The "story part" of Windsor Forest is a mosaic of translated sc.r.a.ps from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The fictions of heathen mythology, which had been repeated to satiety, which exhibited no invention, and had no charm for modern imaginations, are worse than an excrescence in the midst of English prospects, sports, and history. The bad effect does not stop with the puerilities themselves, but they communicate an air of weakness and unreality to the general texture of the work.

The well-merited praise which Bowles bestowed upon "the historical part"

of the poem is inapplicable to the ill drawn character of William the Conqueror. Pope saw in him only a devastator and a tyrant. He had not caught a glimpse of the robust will, and masculine genius, which conquered and consolidated a great country. The vigour, daring, and sagacity which tempered the grosser traits in the mind of William are suppressed, and the masterly warrior and statesman is reduced to an inglorious spoiler of peasants, and hunter of deer. The advantages which accrued to England from the conquest itself were unknown to Pope, who fancied that its princ.i.p.al result was to destroy agriculture, and impoverish the people. He was not aware that it introduced a more advanced civilisation, imparted new energy to a backward stagnant population, opened up to them a vista of grander views, and repaid transitory suffering by vast and permanent benefits.

A fourth element in Windsor Forest is not noticed by Bowles. Pope considered that the "reflections upon life and political inst.i.tutions"

were the distinguis.h.i.+ng excellence of Cooper's Hill. He emulated in this respect his master's merits, surpa.s.sed him in polish of style, and fell below him in strength of thought. Hunting the hare suggests to Pope this poor and false conclusion:

Beasts urged by us their fellow beasts pursue, And learn of man each other to undo.

How much more weighty is the sentiment expressed by Denham, when the stag endeavours to take refuge in the herd:

The herd, unkindly wise, Or chases him from thence, or from him flies; Like a declining statesman, left forlorn To his friends' pity, and pursuers' scorn, With shame remembers, while himself was one Of the same herd, himself the same had done.

The terse satire upon Henry VIII. is a still better specimen of Denham's moralisings. As he surveys the prospect round Cooper's Hill he is reminded of the dissolution of the monasteries, by the sight of the place where once stood a chapel which had shared the fate of its parent abbey. This rouses his indignation, and he thus proceeds:

Tell me, my Muse, what monstrous dire offence, What crime could any Christian king incense To such a rage? Was't luxury or l.u.s.t?

Was _he_ so temperate, so chaste, so just?

Were these their crimes?--they were his own much more; But wealth is crime enough to him that's poor, Who having spent the treasures of his crown, Condemns their luxury to feed his own.

Thus he the church at once protects and spoils: But princes' swords are sharper than their styles.

The last couplet is a contrast between the destroying energy of Henry VIII., and the impotence of his book against Luther.

Windsor Forest has rather more variety in its versification than is usual with Pope. The poem opens with one of those breaks in the metre which were incessant in the older rhymsters, and which were gradually abjured by their successors.

Thy forest, Windsor! and thy green retreats, At once the monarch's and the muse's seats, Invite my lays.

This use of the full stop commonly required that the sense should be carried on without a pause from the preceding line, whereas the theory spread that the close of the sense should coincide with the close of the rhymed sound, or in other words that the full stop should be always at the end of the couplet. To keep the rhyme predominant there was an increasing tendency to have at least the pause of a comma, even after the final word of the first line of the couplet. Thus from a license, which, as Prior says, "was found too dissolute and wild, and came very often too near prose," the writers of heroics arrived at a system which "produced too frequent an ident.i.ty in the sound, and brought every couplet to the point of an epigram."[34] Denham, according to Johnson, was the chief reformer who "taught his followers the art of concluding their sense in couplets,"[35] but he retained much of the primitive freedom, and Prior says that to Dryden belongs the credit of perfecting the innovation, and the blame of pus.h.i.+ng it to excess. Pope went further than Dryden. When once the change had commenced there was a constant movement towards uniformity till the utmost verge was reached, and a fresh reaction began. Bowles, with his fine ear, was a zealous advocate for diversified harmony, and tuneful strength. He felt that an occasional break, managed with skill, adds dignity to the couplet, while the toning down of the final syllables, by sometimes running one verse into another, is a grateful antidote to the cloying monotony of emphatic rhymes. Imperfect rhymes offend from the impression they give of imperfect art, but perfect rhymes softened by the continuous flow of the p.r.o.nunciation, are a relief to the ear. As the rhymed sound should be diminished at intervals, so, at intervals, it may be advantageously increased by the introduction of triplets. Dryden often used them with admirable effect;[36] Pope employed them sparingly, and they were almost entirely laid aside by his immediate imitators. With them the taste for numerous verse was extinct.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Johnson was mistaken. Pope states in a note that the addition commenced at ver. 291.]

[Footnote 2:

When actions, unadorned, are faint and weak, Cities and countries must be taught to speak; G.o.ds may descend in factions from the skies, And rivers from their oozy beds arise.]

[Footnote 3: "Denham," says Johnson, "seems to have been, at least among us, the author of a species of composition that may be denominated _local poetry_, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection or incidental meditation."]

[Footnote 4: Critics differ. "Nothing," says Warton, "can be colder and more prosaic than the manner in which Denham has spoken of the distant prospect of London and St. Paul's."]

[Footnote 5: Singer's Spence, p. 153.]

[Footnote 6: Autobiography of Mrs. Delany, vol. i. p. 20, 82.]

[Footnote 7: Lives of the Poets, ed. Cunningham, vol. ii. p. 307.]

[Footnote 8: Memoires, Col. Michaud, 3rd Series, tom. viii. p. 731; Bolingbroke's Works, vol. ii. p. 315, Philadelphia, 1841.]

[Footnote 9: Bolingbroke's Works, vol. ii. p. 315, 317, 320. "The sole question," says Bolingbroke, "is, who caused this disunion?--and that will be easily decided by every impartial man, who informs himself carefully of the public anecdotes of that time. If the private anecdotes were to be laid open as well as those, and I think it almost time they should, the whole monstrous scene would appear, and shock the eye of every honest man." The prediction has been fulfilled, and the vaunting prophet consigned to infamy through the evidence he invoked.]

[Footnote 10: Bolingbroke's Works, vol. i. p. 123.]

[Footnote 11: Bolingbroke's Works, vol. i. p. 124.]

[Footnote 12: Gibber's Apology, 4th ed. vol. ii. p. 11.]

[Footnote 13: Warburton's Pope, ed. 1760, vol. iv. p. 172; Spence, p.

148.]

[Footnote 14: Hurd's Addison, vol. i. p. 299.]

[Footnote 15: Pope related, perhaps truly, that Addison objected to the phrase "Britons _arise_!" in the Prologue to Cato, and said, "it would be called stirring the people to rebellion." Warburton holds this incident to be a proof that Addison "was exceedingly afraid of party imputations throughout the carriage of the whole affair," as if, because he did not wish to be considered an instigator to rebellion, it followed that he shrunk from seeming an advocate for whig principles.]

[Footnote 16: Pope to Caryll, April 30, 1713.]

[Footnote 17: Scott's Life of Swift, p. 139.]