Lectures on the English Poets Part 7

"Now meet thy fate, incens'd Belinda cry'd, And drew a deadly bodkin from her side.

(The same his ancient personage to deck, Her great, great grandsire wore about his neck, In three seal-rings; which after, melted down, Form'd a vast buckle for his widow's gown: Her infant grandame's whistle next it grew, The bells she jingled, and the whistle blew; Then in a bodkin grac'd her mother's hairs, Which long she wore, and now Belinda wears)."

I do not know how far Pope was indebted for the original idea, or the delightful execution of this poem, to the Lutrin of Boileau.

The Rape of the Lock is a double-refined essence of wit and fancy, as the Essay on Criticism is of wit and sense. The quant.i.ty of thought and observation in this work, for so young a man as Pope was when he wrote it, is wonderful: unless we adopt the supposition, that most men of genius spend the rest of their lives in teaching others what they themselves have learned under twenty. The conciseness and felicity of the expression are equally remarkable. Thus in reasoning on the variety of men's opinion, he says--

" 'Tis with our judgments, as our watches; none Go just alike, yet each believes his own."

Nothing can be more original and happy than the general remarks and ill.u.s.trations in the Essay; the critical rules laid down are too much those of a school, and of a confined one. There is one pa.s.sage in the Essay on Criticism in which the author speaks with that eloquent enthusiasm of the fame of ancient writers, which those will always feel who have themselves any hope or chance of immortality. I have quoted the pa.s.sage elsewhere, but I will repeat it here.

"Still green with bays each ancient altar stands, Above the reach of sacrilegious hands; Secure from flames, from envy's fiercer rage, Destructive war, and all-involving age.

Hail, bards triumphant, born in happier days, Immortal heirs of universal praise!

Whose honours with increase of ages grow, As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow."

These lines come with double force and beauty on the reader, as they were dictated by the writer's despair of ever attaining that lasting glory which he celebrates with such disinterested enthusiasm in others, from the lateness of the age in which he lived, and from his writing in a tongue, not understood by other nations, and that grows obsolete and unintelligible to ourselves at the end of every second century. But he needed not have thus antedated his own poetical doom--the loss and entire oblivion of that which can never die. If he had known, he might have boasted that "his little bark" wafted down the stream of time,

"------With _theirs_ should sail, Pursue the triumph and partake the gale"--

if those who know how to set a due value on the blessing, were not the last to decide confidently on their own pretensions to it.

There is a cant in the present day about genius, as every thing in poetry: there was a cant in the time of Pope about sense, as performing all sorts of wonders. It was a kind of watchword, the s.h.i.+bboleth of a critical party of the day. As a proof of the exclusive attention which it occupied in their minds, it is remarkable that in the Essay on Criticism (not a very long poem) there are no less than half a score successive couplets rhyming to the word _sense_. This appears almost incredible without giving the instances, and no less so when they are given.

"But of the two, less dangerous is the offence, To tire our patience than mislead our sense."--_lines_ 3, 4.

"In search of wit these lose their common sense, And then turn critics in their own defence."--_l._ 28, 29.

"Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence, And fills up all the mighty void of sense."--_l._ 209, 10.

"Some by old words to fame have made pretence, Ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense."--_l._ 324, 5.

" 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence; The sound must seem an echo to the sense."--_l._ 364, 5.

"At every trifle scorn to take offence; That always shews great pride, or little sense."--_l._ 386, 7.

"Be silent always, when you doubt your sense, And speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence."--_l._ 366, 7.

"Be n.i.g.g.ards of advice on no pretence, For the worst avarice is that of sense."--_l._ 578, 9.

"Strain out the last dull dropping of their sense, And rhyme with all the rage of impotence."--_l._ 608, 9.

"Horace still charms with graceful negligence, And without method talks us into sense."--_l._ 653, 4.

I have mentioned this the more for the sake of those critics who are bigotted idolisers of our author, chiefly on the score of his correctness. These persons seem to be of opinion that "there is but one perfect writer, even Pope." This is, however, a mistake: his excellence is by no means faultlessness. If he had no great faults, he is full of little errors. His grammatical construction is often lame and imperfect.

In the Abelard and Eloise, he says--

"There died the best of pa.s.sions, Love and Fame."

This is not a legitimate ellipsis. Fame is not a pa.s.sion, though love is: but his ear was evidently confused by the meeting of the sounds "love and fame," as if they of themselves immediately implied "love, and love of fame." Pope's rhymes are constantly defective, being rhymes to the eye instead of the ear; and this to a greater degree, not only than in later, but than in preceding writers. The praise of his versification must be confined to its uniform smoothness and harmony. In the translation of the Iliad, which has been considered as his masterpiece in style and execution, he continually changes the tenses in the same sentence for the purposes of the rhyme, which shews either a want of technical resources, or great inattention to punctilious exactness. But to have done with this.

The epistle of Eloise to Abelard is the only exception I can think of, to the general spirit of the foregoing remarks; and I should be disingenuous not to acknowledge that it is an exception. The foundation is in the letters themselves of Abelard and Eloise, which are quite as impressive, but still in a different way. It is fine as a poem: it is finer as a piece of high-wrought eloquence. No woman could be supposed to write a better love-letter in verse. Besides the richness of the historical materials, the high _gusto_ of the original sentiments which Pope had to work upon, there were perhaps circ.u.mstances in his own situation which made him enter into the subject with even more than a poet's feeling. The tears shed are drops gus.h.i.+ng from the heart: the words are burning sighs breathed from the soul of love. Perhaps the poem to which it bears the greatest similarity in our language, is Dryden's Tancred and Sigismunda, taken from Boccaccio. Pope's Eloise will bear this comparison; and after such a test, with Boccaccio for the original author, and Dryden for the translator, it need shrink from no other.

There is something exceedingly tender and beautiful in the sound of the concluding lines:

"If ever chance two wandering lovers brings To Paraclete's white walls and silver springs," &c.

The Essay on Man is not Pope's best work. It is a theory which Bolingbroke is supposed to have given him, and which he expanded into verse. But "he spins the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument." All that he says, "the very words, and to the self-same tune," would prove just as well that whatever is, is _wrong_, as that whatever is, is _right_. The Dunciad has splendid pa.s.sages, but in general it is dull, heavy, and mechanical. The sarcasm already quoted on Settle, the Lord Mayor's poet, (for at that time there was a city as well as a court poet)

"Now night descending, the proud scene is o'er, But lives in Settle's numbers one day more"--

is the finest inversion of immortality conceivable. It is even better than his serious apostrophe to the great heirs of glory, the triumphant bards of antiquity!

The finest burst of severe moral invective in all Pope, is the prophetical conclusion of the epilogue to the Satires:

"Virtue may chuse the high or low degree, 'Tis just alike to virtue, and to me; Dwell in a monk, or light upon a king, She's still the same belov'd, contented thing.

Vice is undone if she forgets her birth, And stoops from angels to the dregs of earth.

But 'tis the Fall degrades her to a wh.o.r.e: Let Greatness own her, and she's mean no more.

Her birth, her beauty, crowds and courts confess, Chaste matrons praise her, and grave bishops bless; In golden chains the willing world she draws, And hers the gospel is, and hers the laws; Mounts the tribunal, lifts her scarlet head, And sees pale Virtue carted in her stead.

Lo! at the wheels of her triumphal car, Old England's Genius, rough with many a scar, Dragged in the dust! his arms hang idly round, His flag inverted trains along the ground!

Our youth, all livery'd o'er with foreign gold, Before her dance; behind her, crawl the old!

See thronging millions to the PaG.o.d run, And offer country, parent, wife, or son!

Hear her black trumpet through the land proclaim, That _not to be corrupted is the shame_.

In soldier, churchman, patriot, man in pow'r, 'Tis av'rice all, ambition is no more!

See all our n.o.bles begging to be slaves!

See all our fools aspiring to be knaves!

The wit of cheats, the courage of a wh.o.r.e, Are what ten thousand envy and adore; All, all look up with reverential awe, At crimes that 'scape or triumph o'er the law; While truth, worth, wisdom, daily they decry: Nothing is sacred now but villainy.

Yet may this verse (if such a verse remain) Show there was one who held it in disdain."

His Satires are not in general so good as his Epistles. His enmity is effeminate and petulant from a sense of weakness, as his friends.h.i.+p was tender from a sense of grat.i.tude. I do not like, for instance, his character of Chartres, or his characters of women. His delicacy often borders upon sickliness; his fastidiousness makes others fastidious. But his compliments are divine; they are equal in value to a house or an estate. Take the following. In addressing Lord Mansfield, he speaks of the grave as a scene,

"Where Murray, long enough his country's pride, Shall be no more than Tully, or than Hyde."

To Bolingbroke he says--

"Why rail they then if but one wreath of mine, Oh all-accomplish'd St. John, deck thy shrine?"

Again, he has bequeathed this praise to Lord Cornbury--

"Despise low thoughts, low gains: Disdain whatever Cornbury disdains; Be virtuous and be happy for your pains."

One would think (though there is no knowing) that a descendant of this n.o.bleman, if there be such a person living, could hardly be guilty of a mean or paltry action.

The finest piece of personal satire in Pope (perhaps in the world) is his character of Addison; and this, it may be observed, is of a mixed kind, made up of his respect for the man, and a cutting sense of his failings. The other finest one is that of Buckingham, and the best part of that is the pleasurable.

"------Alas! how changed from him, That life of pleasure and that soul of whim: Gallant and gay, in Cliveden's proud alcove, The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love!"

Among his happiest and most inimitable effusions are the Epistles to Arbuthnot, and to Jervas the painter; amiable patterns of the delightful unconcerned life, blending ease with dignity, which poets and painters then led. Thus he says to Arbuthnot--

"Why did I write? What sin to me unknown Dipp'd me in ink, my parents' or my own?

As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.

I left no calling for this idle trade, No duty broke, no father disobey'd: The muse but serv'd to ease some friend, not wife; To help me through this long disease, my life?