The Age of Pope

In 1712 Pope had published The Rape of the Lock, which Addison justly praised as 'a delicious little thing.' At the same time he advised the poet not to attempt improving it, which he proposed to do, and Pope most unreasonably attributed this advice to jealousy. In 1714 the delightful poem appeared in its present form with the machinery of sylphs and gnomes adopted from the mysteries of the Rosicrucians. Pope styles it an heroi-comical poem, and judged in the light of a burlesque it is conceived and executed with an art that is beyond praise. Lord Petre, a Roman Catholic peer, had cut off a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor's hair, much to the indignation of her family and possibly of the young lady also. Pope wrote the poem to remove the discord caused by the fatal shears, but its publication, and two or three offensive allusions it contained, only served to add to Miss Fermor's annoyance. 'The celebrated lady herself,' the poet wrote, 'is offended, and which is stranger, not at herself but me. Is not this enough to make a writer never be tender of another's character or fame?' But Pope, whose praise of women is too often a libel upon them, was not as tender as he ought to have been of the lady's reputation.

The offence felt by the heroine of the poem is now unheeded; the dainty art exhibited is a permanent delight, and our language can boast no more perfect specimen of the poetical burlesque than the Rape of the Lock. The machinery of the sylphs is managed with perfect skill, and nothing can be more admirable than the charge delivered by Ariel to the sylphs to guard Belinda from an apprehended but unknown danger. The concluding lines shall be quoted:

'Whatever spirit, careless of his charge,His post neglects, or leaves the fair at large,Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o'ertake his sins,Be stopped in vials, or transfixed with pins;Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie,Or wedged, whole ages, in a bodkin's eye;Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain,While clogged he beats his silken wings in vain;Or alum styptics, with contracting power,Shrink his thin essence like a rivelled flower;Or, as Ixion fixed, the wretch shall feelThe giddy motion of the whirling mill,In fumes of burning chocolate shall glow,And tremble at the sea that froths below!'

Another striking portion of the poem is the description of the Spanish game of Ombre, imitated from Vida's Scacchia Ludus. 'Vida's poem,' says Mr. Elwin, 'is a triumph of ingenuity, when the intricacy of chess is considered, and the difficulty of expressing the moves in a dead language. Yet the original is eclipsed by Pope's more consummate copy.'12

Many famous passages illustrative of Pope's art might be extracted from this poem, but it will suffice to give the portrait of Belinda:

'On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore,Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore;Her lively looks a sprightly mind disclose,Quick as her eyes and as unfixed as those;Favours to none, to all she smiles extends,Oft she rejects, but never once offends.Bright as the sun her eyes the gazers strike,And, like the sun, they shine on all alike.Yet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride,Might hide her faults, if belles had faults to hide:If to her share some female errors fall,Look on her face and you'll forget them all.'

The Temple of Fame, a liberal paraphrase of Chaucer's House of Fame, followed in 1715, and despite the praise of Steele, who declared that it had a thousand beauties, and of Dr. Johnson, who observes that every part is splendid, must be pronounced one of Pope's least attractive pieces. Two poems of the emotional and sentimental class, Eloisa to Abelard and the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady (1717), are more worthy of attention. Nowhere, probably, in the language are finer specimens to be met with of rhetorical pathos, but poets like Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Tennyson can touch the heart more deeply by a phrase or couplet than Pope is able to do by his elaborate representations of passion. The reader is not likely to be affected by the following response of Eloisa to an invitation from the spirit world:

'I come, I come! prepare your roseate bowers,Celestial palms and ever-blooming flowers.Thither, where sinners may have rest, I go,Where flames refined in breasts seraphic glow;Thou, Abelard! the last sad office pay,And smooth my passage to the realms of day;See my lips tremble and my eye-balls roll,Suck my last breath and catch my flying soul!Ah no – in sacred vestments may'st thou stand,The hallowed taper trembling in thy hand,Present the Cross before my lifted eye,Teach me at once and learn of me to die.'

The music or the fervour of the poem delighted Porson, famous for his Greek and his potations, and whether drunk or sober he would recite, or rather sing it, from the beginning to the end. The felicity of the versification is incontestable, but at the same time artifice is more visible than nature throughout the Epistle, and this is true also of The Elegy, a composition in which Pope's method of treating mournful topics is excellently displayed. The opening lines are suggested by Ben Jonson's Elegy on the Marchioness of Winchester, a lady whose death was also lamented by Milton. These we shall not quote, but take in preference a passage which is perhaps as graceful an expression of poetical rhetoric as can be found in Pope's verse.

'By foreign hands thy dying eyes were closed,By foreign hands thy decent limbs composed,By foreign hands thy humble grave adorned,By strangers honoured, and by strangers mourned!What though no friends in sable weeds appear,Grieve for an hour, perhaps, then mourn a year,And bear about the mockery of woe,To midnight dances and the public show?What though no weeping Loves thy ashes grace,Nor polished marble emulate thy face?What though no sacred earth allow thee room,Nor hallowed dirge be muttered o'er thy tomb?Yet shall thy grave with rising flowers be drest,And the green turf lie lightly on thy breast;There shall the morn her earliest tears bestow,There the first roses of the year shall blow;While angels with their silver wings o'ershadeThe ground, now sacred by thy reliques made.'

For some years Pope had been brooding over and slowly labouring at a task which was destined to add greatly to his fame and also to his fortune.

In 1708 his early friend, Sir William Trumbull, had advised him to translate the Iliad, and five years later the poet, following the custom of the age, invited subscriptions to the work, which was to appear in six volumes at the price of six guineas. About this time Swift, who by the aid of his powerful pen was assisting Harley and St. John to rule the country, made Pope's acquaintance, and ultimately became perhaps the most faithful of his friends. Swift, who was able to help everybody but himself, zealously promoted the poet's scheme, and was heard to say at the coffee-houses that 'the best poet in England Mr. Pope a Papist' had begun a translation of Homer which he should not print till he had a thousand guineas for him.

He was not satisfied with this service, but introduced the poet to St. John, Atterbury, and Harley. The first volume of Pope's Homer appeared in 1715, and in the same year Addison's friend Tickell published his version of the first book of the Iliad. Pope affected to believe that this was done at Addison's instigation.

Already, as we have said, there had been a misunderstanding between the two famous wits, and Pope, whose irritable temperament led him into many quarrels and created a host of enemies, ceased from this time to regard Addison as a friend. Probably neither of them can be exempted from blame, and we can well believe that Addison, whose supremacy had formerly been uncontested, could not without some jealousy 'bear a brother near the throne,' but the chief interest of the estrangement to the literary student is the famous satire written at a later date, in which Addison appears under the character of Atticus.13 It is necessary to add here that the whole story of the quarrel comes to us from Pope, who is never to be trusted, either in prose or verse, when he wishes to excuse himself at the expense of a rival.

Pope had no cause for discontent at his position; not even the strife of parties stood in the way of his Homer, which was praised alike by Whig and Tory, and brought the translator a fortune. It has been calculated that the entire version of the Iliad and Odyssey, the payments for which covered eleven years, yielded Pope a clear profit of about £9,000, and it is said to have made at the same time the fortune of his publisher. Pope, I believe, was the first poet who, without the aid of patronage or of the stage, was able to live in comfort from the sale of his works.

He knew how to value money, but fame was dearer to him than wealth, and of both he had now enough to satisfy his ambition. Posterity has not endorsed the general verdict of his contemporaries on his famous translation. He had to encounter indeed some severe comments, and Richard Bentley, the greatest classical scholar then living, must have vexed the sensitive poet when he told him that his version was a pretty poem but he must not call it Homer. By this criticism, however, as Matthew Arnold has observed, the work is judged in spite of all its power and attractiveness. Pope wants Homer's simplicity and directness, and his artifices of style are utterly alien to the Homeric spirit. Dr. Johnson quotes the judgment of critics who say that Pope's Homer 'exhibits no resemblance of the original and characteristic manner of the Father of Poetry, as it wants his awful simplicity, his artless grandeur, his unaffected majesty,' and observes that this cannot be totally denied. He argues, however, that even in Virgil's time the demand for elegance had been so much increased that mere nature could be endured no longer, that every age improves in elegance, that if some Ovidian graces are, alas! not to be found in the English Iliad 'to have added can be no great crime if nothing be taken away.' Johnson was not aware that to add 'poetical elegances' to the words and thoughts of a great poet is to destroy much of the beauty of his verse and many of its most striking characteristics. As well might he say that the beauty of a lovely woman can be enhanced by a profusion of trinkets, or that a Greek statue would be more worthy of admiration if it were elegantly dressed. Dr. Johnson says, with perfect truth, that Pope wrote for his own age, and it may be added that he exhibits extraordinary art in ministering to the taste of the age; yet it is hardly too much to affirm that in the exercise of his craft as a translator he is continually false to nature and therefore false to Homer.

On the other hand his Iliad if read as a story runs so smoothly, that the reader, and especially the young reader, is carried through the narrative without any sense of fatigue. It is not a little praise to say that it is a poem which every school-boy will read with pleasure, and in which every critical reader who is content to surrender his judgment for awhile, will find pleasure also. Mr. Courthope in his elaborate and masterly Life of Pope, which gives the coping stone to an exhaustive edition of the poet's works, praises a fine passage from the Iliad, which in his judgment attains perhaps the highest level of which the heroic couplet is capable, and 'I do not believe,' he adds, 'that any Englishman of taste and imagination can read the lines without feeling that if Pope had produced nothing but his translation of Homer, he would be entitled to the praise of a great original poet.'

Pope's editor could not perhaps have selected a better illustration of his best manner than this speech of Sarpedon to Glaucus, which is parodied in the Rape of the Lock. The concluding lines shall be quoted.

'Could all our care elude the gloomy grave,Which claims no less the fearful than the brave,For lust of fame I should not vainly dareIn fighting fields, nor urge the soul to war,But since, alas! ignoble age must come,Disease, and death's inexorable doom;The life which others pay let us bestow,And give to fame what we to nature owe;Brave though we fall, and honoured if we live,Or let us glory gain, or glory give.'

We may add that neither its false glitter nor Pope's inability – shared in great measure with every translator – to catch the spirit of the original, can conceal the sustained power of this brilliant work. Its merit is the more wonderful since the poet's knowledge of Greek was extremely meagre, and he is said to have been constantly indebted to earlier translations. Gibbon said that his Homer had every merit except that of faithfulness to the original; and Pope, could he have heard it, might well have been satisfied with the verdict of Gray, a great scholar as well as a great poet, that no other version would ever equal his.

All that has been hitherto said with regard to Pope and Homer relates to his version of the Iliad. On that he expended his best powers, and on that it is evident he bestowed infinite pains. The Odyssey, one of the most beautiful stories in the world, appears to have been taken up with a weary pen, and in putting it into English he sought the assistance of Broome and Fenton, two minor poets and Cambridge scholars. They translated twelve books out of the twenty-four, and so skilfully did they catch Pope's style that it is almost impossible to discern any difference between his work and theirs. The literary partnership led to one of Pope's discreditable manœuvres, in which, strange to say, he was assisted by Broome, whom he induced to set his name to a falsehood. Pope as we have said, translated twelve books, while eight were allotted to Broome and four to Fenton. Yet he led Broome, unknown to his colleague, to ascribe only three books to himself and two to Fenton, and at the same time the poet, who confessed that he could 'equivocate pretty genteely,' stated the amount he had paid for Broome's eight books as if it had been paid for three. The story is disgraceful both to Pope and Broome, and why the latter should have practised such a deception is unaccountable. He was a beneficed clergyman and a man of wealth, so that he could not have lied for money even if Pope had been willing to bribe him. Fenton was indignant, as he well might be, but he was too lazy or too good-natured to expose the fraud. Broome had his deserts later on, but Pope, who ridiculed him in the Dunciad, and in his Treatise on the Bathos, was the last man in the world entitled to render them.

The partnership in poetry which produced the Odyssey was not a great literary success, and most readers will prefer the version of Cowper, whose blank verse, though out of harmony with the rapid movement of the Iliad is not unfitted for the quieter beauties of the Odyssey.

In 1721, prior to the publication of his version, the poet had agreed to edit an edition of Shakespeare, a task as difficult as any which a man of letters can undertake. Pope was not qualified to achieve it. He was comparatively ignorant of Elizabethan literature, the dry labours of an editor were not to his taste, and he lacked true sympathy with the genius of the poet. Failure was therefore inevitable, and Theobald, who has some solid merits as a commentator, found it easy to discern and to expose the errors of Pope. For doing so he was afterwards 'hitched' into the Dunciad, and made in the first instance its hero. The "Shakespeare" was published in 1725 in six volumes quarto. 'Its chief claim,' Mr. Courthope writes, 'to interest at the present day, is that it forms the immediate starting-point for the long succession of Pope's satires… The vexation caused to the poet by the undoubted justice of many of Theobald's strictures procured for the latter the unwelcome honour of being recognized as the King of the Dunces, and coupled with Bentley's disparaging mention of the Translation of the Iliad provoked the many contemptuous allusions to verbal criticism in Pope's later satires.'14

A striking peculiarity of Pope's art may be mentioned here. He was able only to play on one instrument, the heroic couplet. When he attempted any other form of verse the result, if not total failure, was mediocrity. It was a daring act of Pope to suggest by his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, a comparison with the Alexander's Feast of Dryden. The performance is perfunctory rather than spontaneous, and the few lyrical efforts he attempted in addition, show no ear for music. The voice of song with which even the minor poets of the Elizabethan age were gifted was silent in England, though not in Scotland, during the first half of the eighteenth century, or if a faint note is occasionally heard, as in the lyrics of Gay, it is without the grace and joyous freedom of the earlier singers. Not that the lyrical form was wanting; many minor versifiers, like Hughes, Sheffield, Granville, and Somerville, wrote what they called songs, but unfortunately without an ear for singing.

In this short summary and criticism of a poet's literary life it would be out of place to insert many biographical details, were it not that, in the case of Pope, the student who knows little or nothing of the man will fail to understand his poetry. A distinguished critic has said that the more we know of Pope's age the better shall we understand Pope. With equal truth it may be said that a familiarity with the poet's personal character is essential to an adequate appreciation of his genius. His friendships, his enmities, his mode of life at Twickenham, the entangled tale of his correspondence, his intrigues in the pursuit of fame, his constitutional infirmities, the personal character of his satires, these are a few of the prominent topics with which a student of the poet must make himself conversant. It may be well, therefore, to give the history in brief outline, and we have now reached the crisis in his fortunes which will conveniently enable us to do so.

In 1716 Pope's family had removed from Binfield to Chiswick. A year later he lost his father, to whose memory he has left a filial tribute, and shortly afterwards he bought the small estate of five acres at Twickenham with which his name is so intimately associated. Before reaching the age of thirty Pope was regarded as the first of living poets. His income more than sufficed for all his wants. At Twickenham the great in intellect, and the great by birth, met around his table; he was welcomed by the highest society in the land, and although proud of his intimacy with the nobility, 'unplaced, unpensioned,' he was 'no man's heir or slave,' and jealously preserved his independence. 'Pope,' says Johnson, 'never set genius to sale, he never flattered those whom he did not love, or praised those whom he did not esteem,' and he was, we may add, in this respect a striking contrast to Dryden, who lavished his flatteries wholesale.

With a mother to whom he was tenderly attached, with troops of friends, with an undisputed supremacy in the world of letters, and with a vocation that was the joy of his heart, – if possessions like these can confer happiness, Pope should have been a happy man.

But his 'crazy carcass,' as the painter Jervas called it, was united to the most suspicious and irritable of temperaments, and the fine wine of his poetry was rarely free from bitterness in the cup. Pope could be a warm friend, but was not always a faithful one, and even women whose friendship he had enjoyed suffered from the venom of his satire. He was not a man to rise above his age, and it would be charitable to ascribe a portion of his grossness to it. Voltaire is said by his loose talk to have driven Pope's good old mother from the table at Twickenham; Walpole's language not only in his home at Houghton, but at Court, was insufferably coarse; and Pope wrote to ladies in language that must have disgusted modest women even in his free-speaking day. His foul lines on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to whom he had formerly written in a most ridiculous strain of gallantry, and to whom he is said to have made love,15 cannot easily be characterized in moderate language. Lady Mary had little delicacy herself, but the poet, who thought himself a gentleman, had no excuse for abusing her. Excuses indeed are not easily to be offered for Pope's moral defalcations. His life was a series of petty intrigues, trickeries, and deceptions. He could not, it has been said, – the conceit is borrowed from Young's Satires– 'take his tea without a stratagem,' and knew how to utter the loftiest sentiments while acting the most contemptible of parts.

The long and intricate deceptions which he practised to secure the publication of his letters, while so manipulating them as to enhance his credit, were suspected to some extent in his own age, and have been painfully laid bare in ours. It is an amazing story, which may be read at large in Mr. Dilke's Papers of a Critic, or in the elaborate narrative of Mr. Elwin in the first volume of his edition of Pope. It will be there seen how the poet compiled fictitious letters, suppressed passages, altered dates, manufactured letters out of other letters, and secretly enabled the infamous bookseller Curll to publish his correspondence surreptitiously in order that he might have the excuse for printing it himself in a more carefully prepared form. The worst feature of the miserable story is the poet's conduct with regard to Swift, his oldest and most faithful friend. On this subject the writer may be allowed to quote what he has said elsewhere.

'Years before, Swift, who cared little for literary reputation, and never resorted to any artifice to promote it, had suspected Pope of a desire to make literary capital out of their correspondence, and the poet had excused himself according to his wonted fashion. After the publication by Curll, he begged Swift to return him his letters lest they should fall into the bookseller's hands. The Dean replied, no doubt to Pope's infinite chagrin, that they were safe in his keeping, as he had given strict orders in his will that his executors should burn every letter he might leave behind him. Afterwards he promised that Pope should eventually have them but declined giving them up during his lifetime. Hereupon Pope changed his tactics and begged that he might have the letters to print. The publication by Curll of two letters (probably another ruse of Pope's) formed an additional ground for urging his request. All his efforts were unavailing until he obtained the assistance of Lord Orrery, to whom Swift was at length induced to deliver up the letters. There was a hiatus in the correspondence and Pope took advantage of this and of a blunder made by Swift, whose memory at the time was not to be trusted, to hint, what he dared not directly assert, that the bulk of the collection remained with the Dean, and that Swift's own letters had been returned to him. We have now irresistible proof that the Dublin edition of the letters was taken from an impression sent from England and sent by Pope. Nor was this all. The poet acted with still greater meanness, for he had the audacity to deplore the sad vanity of Swift in permitting the publication of his correspondence, and to declare that "no decay of body is half so miserable."'16

That he had many fine qualities in spite of the littlenesses which mar his character one would be loath to doubt. Among his nobler traits was an ardent passion for literature, a courage which enabled him to face innumerable obstacles – 'Pope,' says Mr. Swinburne, 'was as bold as a lion' – and a constant devotion to his parents, especially to his mother, who lived to a great age. There are no sincerer words in his letters than those which relate to Mrs. Pope. 'It is my mother only,' he once wrote, regretting his inability to leave home, 'that robs me of half the pleasure of my life, and that gives me the greatest at the same time,' and the lines expressing his affection for her are familiar to most readers. Truly does Johnson say that 'life has among its soothing and quiet comforts few things better to give than such a son.'

Among his lady friends the dearest was Martha Blount, the younger of two beautiful sisters, of whom Gay sang as 'the fair-haired Martha and Teresa brown.' They came of an old Roman Catholic family residing at Mapledurham, and were little more than girls when Pope first knew them. With the elder sister he quarrelled, but Martha was faithful to him for life, and when he was dying it is said that her coming in 'gave a new turn of spirits or a temporary strength to him.' Swift, as we have said, was one of the warmest of Pope's friends, and his letters to the poet are by far the most attractive portion of the published correspondence. He visited him at Twickenham more than once, and on one occasion spent some months under his roof. Bolingbroke, his 'guide, philosopher, and friend,' who for a time lived near to him at Dawley, was a frequent guest, so also, in the days of their intimacy, was Lady Mary, who had a house at Twickenham. Thomson the poet, too, lived not far off, and was visited by his brother bard, whom Thomson's barber describes as 'a strange, ill-formed, little figure of a man,' but he adds, 'I have heard him and Quin and Patterson17 talk so together that I could have listened to them for ever.' Arbuthnot, one of the finest wits and best men of his time, who, as Swift said, could do everything but walk, was also a faithful friend of Pope; so was Gay, and so was Bishop Atterbury, who, as the poet said, first taught him to think "as becomes a reasonable creature."