Alexander Pope.
Alexander Pope, the son of Catholic parents in the trading class, was born in the year of Revolution, 1688. His education was private, priests were his tutors, but he acquired Latin, and was from childhood a great reader of poetry, and an imitator of what he read. He was not born deformed, but overstudy, perhaps, or unnoted accident, made him the stunted and crooked thing that he became, while his health, and the hideous personal insults which his enemies used as freely as Hazlitt did in later times, exasperated his temper.
His parents withdrew to Windsor Forest, a centre of Catholic families like the Blounts and Englefields. Pope was early introduced to the coffee-house wits by the most chivalrous and accomplished of men, Charles Wogan, who, in 1719, rescued from prison in Austria, and brought to her affianced prince in Italy, Clementina Sobieska, mother of Prince Charles.
Pope corresponds very early, on literary subjects, with the veteran Wycherley (of whom Pope's account is, as always, quite untrustworthy) and with "knowing Walsh". He taught himself verse by translating the Latin poet Statius, and at 21 published, in 1709, his "Pastorals," "written at the age of 16," according to Pope.
It is not possible here to examine all Pope's statements about his works, all his really ingenious ways of fishing for fame, of mystifying; and, with none of the coarseness of our contemporary literary advertisement, of acting as his own interviewer and his own[Pg 383] advertiser. He had no need to practise these arts, but his methods are amusing as exposed by his learned and hostile editor, Elwin. Pope's great delight was in literary quarrels, and he managed to pick some very pretty quarrels out of remarks on his pastorals and those of Philips which appeared in "The Guardian". Pope preluded his pastorals by an essay on pastoral poetry in general; a genre of which it may be said that Theocritus (using literary models, such as Stesichorus, and also familiar with the songs of Sicilian peasants) introduced it in immortal poems; Virgil imitated Theocritus: and Pope thinks that Virgil "refines upon his original, and in all points when judgment is principally concerned, he is much superior to his master". It would have been pleasant to set down Pope to the construing of a few passages from Theocritus. Pope kept pretty close to his originals: and follows his own advice "the numbers should be the smoothest, the most easy and flowing imaginable". The brevity of the pastorals, their smoothness, and their avoidance of the "burning questions" of the day, so commonly intruded into Elizabethan pastorals, permit Pope's to be read with ease and even with pleasure.
In the "Essay on Criticism" (1711) we find Pope with an ambition to reform the world of literature. It is not easy to find out exactly what he would be at, for he uses such terms as "Nature," "wit," "judgment," in various ways. Nature seems permanent enough, but human views of "Nature" differ perpetually, and when Pope says, "First follow Nature," what does he mean by "Nature"? Why are "wit" and "judgment" "at strife"? The poet refers them to Nature as interpreted by Greek art for a verdict; and of Greek art he knew very little. Read Homer and Virgil, especially Virgil, he says. The poem, though it teaches us little about criticism, is full of lines so witty and so pointed that they are now proverbial.
In 1713 he published "Windsor Forest," admired by Swift, his life-long friend; with Addison he was on apparently good terms, but he was already suspicious. He attacked Dennis, who had assailed Addison's "Cato," and he did so in a style which Addison, through Steele, repudiated. Addison's praise of Philips's pastorals, with their Fairies, to Pope appeared dispraise of his[Pg 384] own; and in an article in "The Guardian" he made fun of Philips with ingenious irony of commendation.
Pope's great work, his version of the "Iliad," appearing in portions (1715-1720), met a kind of challenge in Tickell's version of the First Book. Addison spoke well of Tickell's specimen; did he write it, or inspire it, or set it up as a rival to Pope's? Pope, much later, told his own story of his wrongs and of his noble and dignified treatment of Addison. His most loyal biographer cannot accept the tale: at all events Pope wrote, and much later published, his famous verses on Addison (Atticus). (Published, 1722, after Addison's death.) The two men ceased to be friends, but Addison never hit back. Pope had also suspected him for doubts as to the wisdom of adding to the first shape of "The Rape of the Lock" (1712) the machinery of Sylphs and Gnomes in the second form (1714). The addition was deservedly successful, but Addison might well hesitate to recommend a change in that tiny mock-epic of a quarrel about the stealing of a lock of hair. It is perfection in its way, in its wit, sauciness, and gaiety.
The "Iliad," a terrible task for Pope, executed through long years of advice from all quarters, of doubt, and of weariness, was a triumph, celebrated in charming verses by Gay's "Welcome to Mr. Pope on His Return from Greece". In that strange age the noble, the great, the beautiful swelled Pope's triumph; literature was fashionable. Pope's "Iliad" can never be superseded as a masterpiece of English literature. He was no scholar, but he had many friends to help him, and his plan was to give the spirit of the Epic, as he conceived it, in a form which his age could appreciate. It is almost as if he had taken Homer's theme and written the poem himself. The minor characteristics of the antique manner are gone; but his age would have thought them barbarous and fatiguing. Wherever there is rhetoric, as in the speeches of the heroes, Pope is magnificent; where there are pictures of external nature he is conventional. But he is never slow. His conventions were those of his age, and are extinct, but time cannot abate the splendour of his spirit.
In doing the "Odyssey," of which the first part appeared in 1725, he was aided by Fenton and Broome, who, under his supervision,[Pg 385] wrote exactly like himself. With them, too, there were quarrels; they were not paid in what they reckoned a satisfactory style. Pope received about ￡10,000 in all for Homer, a large sum in those days, and not likely to be equalled by the gains of any later translator of Homer. He dabbled in the shares of the South Sea Bubble, and appears to have been rather a winner than a loser.
He had accumulated quarrels to his heart's content, hence "The Dunciad" of 1728-1729: a satire on minor men of letters, in which he shows wit and ill-nature enough, with a vein of true poetry in the conclusion; but the dirt and the personalities are now rather amazing than agreeable; while the necessary notes below drive the text into the garrets of the page. Not even Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had laughed at Pope's attempts to make love to her, escaped a flick of the whip of scandal in "The Dunciad". Perhaps Pope had not been gently treated, but nobody admires his revenges. The business of publication was managed with all the intricate wiles and subterfuges in which he took such strange delight. One of his butts, Cibber, retorted in kind, and was successful in giving pain: Theobald, a useful editor of Shakespeare, Pope assailed, because Theobald had not spared the errors in his own edition (1728).
His later works, Epistles to Burlington and Arbuthnot, "The Essay on Man," the "Imitations of Horace," are full of the wit and polished verse that were natural to Pope, and were fostered by his friendships with St. John (Bolingbroke), Swift, Gay, and Arbuthnot; friendships that never failed, and eternally testify to the better part in Pope, despite his tempers of malice and his feline arts. His enthusiasm for Atterbury, exhibited in letters written before the bishop's too well-merited exile, is the most romantic point in his career. Late in life he was kind to Johnson and Thomson; he had been a good son; his character greatly irritated his most learned editor, Mr. Elwin; but nobody suffered so much from his faults of jealousy and suspiciousness as Pope himself. He died on 30 May, 1744.
Ever since the romantic movement of the early nineteenth century, people have asked "Was Pope a poet?" He was, in the highest degree, the kind of poet that his age and the English[Pg 386] society of his age desired and deserved; a town poet—where rural nature is concerned, conventional and unobservant; where Man is concerned a poet of Man, literary, political, and fashionable. In the great fight over Pope's claim to be a poet, of 1819, when Bowles was the assailant, Byron was the champion of Pope: Byron himself being a satirist and a poet of mankind, urban, political, and fashionable, as well as piratical. Horace was busied with the same field of human nature (not with the desperate pirate and remorseful Giaour) but nobody has asked "Was Horace a poet?"
Pope wrote in reaction against the conceited poetry of the seventeenth century; he did well, though the manner was already dead, but he never came within sight or hearing of the inspired songs of Lovelace and Carew. The world of Pope was in many ways a limited and evanescent and artificial world; but in his verse it lives eternally, and that is enough for his fame, and testimony sufficient to his genius. He brought his instrument, the decasyllabic couplet, to the perfection required for his purpose, each couplet existing in and for itself. But in reading him we feel that "paper-sparing Pope" wrote down his best passages, detached, on the backs of letters; they are separate inspirations, and are fitted into the whole like fragments of a mosaic: for example the lines on Atticus are fitted into "The Epistle to Arbuthnot". His rhymes, as "fault" to "thought," are not the things on which he bestowed most pains.
Concerning other poets—Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare—we feel that, in any age of literature, in any period of taste, under any conventions, they must have been great. Pope, on the other hand, cannot easily be thought of as having the capacity for greatness, except in the literary conditions of the early eighteenth century. But in that period he was supreme.
Prior.
From the galaxy of wits who dined with Harley and St. John and were addressed in that splendid society by their Christian names, Jonathan or Mat, Matthew Prior stands somewhat apart. His duties as a diplomatist carried him abroad; he owed his diplomatic posts to his wit, not to his birth, which Queen Anne[Pg 387] spoke of as unpleasantly obscure. He was born on 14 July, 1664, at Wimborne or Winburn, in Dorsetshire; Westminster was his school, and St. John's, Cambridge, his college. Here he took his degree, in 1686, and obtained a fellowship in 1688. He attracted the notice of the Whigs by parodying Dryden's "Hind and Panther," in "The Town and Country Mouse," aided in the jest by Charles Montagu. Dryden is very improbably said to have wept; the Whigs, at all events, laughed, and in 1691 made Prior secretary to the Embassy in Holland. He held the same post at Versailles later; at this time he was a sincere eulogist of our Dutch deliverer, William III, whom he celebrated in "The Carmen Seculare" (1700), indeed constantly, like Horace, he "praising his tyrant sung". Reviewing history, he places William before a number of Roman heroes, and, remembering that William's wife is a Stuart, bids the god Janus
Finding some of Stuart's race
Unhappy, pass their annals by.
But, as thou dwell'st upon that heavenly name
To grief for ever sacred, as to fame,
O! read it to thyself: in silence weep!
Is the name Charles or Mary? At this time there was a fashionable cult of Mary Stuart. This long ode, granting the mythology, has considerable merit, though, says Dr. Johnson, "Who can be supposed to have laboured through it?" Not the Doctor, as he candidly confesses.
Under Queen Anne, Prior was tempted over to the Tory party, and his doings, as a negotiator with France, were thought, and perhaps not unjustly, to smack of Jacobitism. He was in Paris when Beatrix Esmond's Duke of Hamilton was about to go thither on a mission, and there seems little doubt (from a record by Lockhart of Carnwath, the leader of the Scottish Cavaliers) that Hamilton was to bring over to England, in disguise, the exiled son of James II, "the Pretender," as Colonel Esmond does in Thackeray's novel. But Hamilton fell in a duel with Mohun, and that chance was lost.
As acknowledged ambassador, Prior was at the French Court[Pg 388] from August, 1712, to August, 1714, when the death of Queen Anne scattered the Tories. Early in 1715 he was locked up on suspicion of treason, and was not released till three years later.
The hope of the Whigs was to decapitate Harley, who lay in the Tower; but Harley could have involved Marlborough, possessing a fatal letter of his, and finally Prior and Harley were released. He had now no resources except his college fellowship, but his friends by securing a large subscription for his poems, and by the generosity of the family of Harley, placed him beyond want. He died on September 18, 1721.
Prior does not live by his "Alma, or the Progress of the Mind," a long poem in rhymed eight syllable couplets, in the manner of Butler's "Hudibras". This work is a kind of comic history of Psychology, and ends with Barry Lyndon's rhyme to Aristotle, "Here, Jonathan, your master's bottle!" Prior's "Solomon," on the vanity of knowledge, pleasure, and power, in heroic rhymed verse, is best remembered for two lines to Abra, and might, so easily does the author take his theme, be called the vanity of melancholy, though it closes in serious admonitions to "the weary King Ecclesiast".
Prior's tales in the manner of Fontaine's "Contes," are lively, like these; and like these, may have seemed coarse to such a moralist as Sir Richard Steele.
Prior, in fact, lives by his merry, tender, light, and bright social verses, in tripping measures, for example, "Thus Kitty, beautiful and young" (for Gay's patroness, the Duchess of Queensberry), "To a Child of Quality," "The Merchant, to Secure His Treasure," "Dear Chloe, how blubber'd is that pretty face," and many other things; the best reminding us more of the charming trifles in the Greek Anthology than of Horace.
Gay.
The spoiled improvident child in the group of wits was John Gay, to whom Pope and Swift were attached by the most tender affection. Gay was an author who never aimed high, but who almost always hit his mark and pleased the Town. But his success was so much the consequence of choosing the happy moments,[Pg 389] his poems are so completely poems of his age, that he is now praised at a venture rather than read. He was born at Barnstaple, in Devonshire (1685); though of an old family he "was without prospect of hereditary riches," and was "placed apprentice with a silk-mercer" in London.
Perhaps some fair customer discovered that he had a soul above silk; the Duchess of Monmouth, the heiress of the Scotts of Buccleuch, made him her secretary (1712). Becoming acquainted with Pope, Gay dedicated to him (1713) his "Rural Sports" in the usual heroic rhymed couplets. Gay's descriptions of nature, and his praises, are more genuine than, in that age of the Town, such things usually were. He writes of angling "with his eye on the object," in Wordsworth's phrase. His remarks on fishing with the worm, a theme unworthy of the Muse, are judicious. As to fly fishing, Gay is among those who advocate a search for the insect in the waters and an exact imitation. He would have us fish "fine and far off," with "a single hair" next the hook, and perhaps he is the first to recommend the use of the "dry" or floating fly: "Upon the curling surface let it glide," not sunk. The catching of a salmon is not ill described, but as Gay retains his "single hair," he must always have been broken if he did happen to hook a fish. For his own part, he never uses either worm or the natural fly: never tries for coarse fish—pike, perch, and so forth,—and this justifies the affection of his friends.
In "The Shepherd's Week" (1714) his Idylls describe real peasants with their folklore superstitions, but Virgil, or Theocritus, is still imitated. The pastoral is an extinct species of literature, but Gay's were more natural and popular than Pope's. Dedicated to St. John, in verses celebrating the recovery of Queen Anne, who presently died, the poems were ungrateful to the Hanoverian Court, and Gay lost the secretaryship to an ambassador.
Gay's "Welcome from Greece, to Mr. Pope on his having finished his translation of the 'Iliad,'" has already been mentioned as one of the most charming relics of that golden age of letters, wit, and friendship.
Friendship did not aid wit, when Pope and Arbuthnot took[Pg 390] hands in, and ruined, Gay's "Three Hours after Marriage," a comedy which was not comic (1717). In 1720 his collected poems brought Gay ￡1000: but a gift of stock in the South Sea Bubble was profitless, as Gay would not sell out in time. In 1727 he was offered by George II a Court place so small and ludicrous that it was declined.
Gay next made an immense but not a lucrative success with "The Beggar's Opera," which had an unexampled run of seven weeks. A sequel was not licensed by the censor; Gay was recouped by a subscription, and fell out of Court favour. The Duchess of Queensberry (Prior's Kitty), carried him to her place in the country, and here he was petted till his death, which seems to have been caused by indolence and the pleasures of the table.
His "Trivia; or the Art of Walking the Streets of London," is a vivacious picture of the crowds, dirt, and bustle: his "Fables," though original and witty, are, like pastorals, an obsolete form of literary entertainment. He wrote his own epitaph,
Life is a jest, and all things show it,
I thought so once, but now I know it.
He took a different view of this important theme in "Thoughts on Eternity".
Ambrose Philips.
But for his friendship with Addison and the collision of his "Pastorals," with those of Pope, producing Pope's famous ironical review, Ambrose Philips (1675-1749) would scarcely be remembered. The modern art of "booming" was illustrated in Philips's case. A whole 'Spectator' was devoted to a puff of his adaptation ("The Distressed Mother") of the "Andromache" of Racine: and another told how it affected Sir Roger de Coverley. As has occasionally happened more recently, though advertised by Addison, and by his own threat to birch Pope, "Philips became ridiculous, without his own fault, by the absurd admiration of his friends," and his Christian name, Ambrose, became the ludicrous nickname, Namby-pamby. But for Philips[Pg 391] there was not lacking a patron, Boulter, Primate of Ireland, and in Ireland places were found for the exile. Philips translated several Odes of Pindar, and though he had not the pinion of the Theban eagle, the sentiments of Pindar are plainly visible in his versions.
Tickell.
Among the minor stars in the golden galaxy of Queen Anne's reign scrutiny detects Thomas Tickell. (Born in Cumberland in 1686, educated at Queen's, Oxford.) He is best remembered in connexion with Pope's story that to damage his translation of the "Iliad," Addison translated the First Book and published it, averring that Tickell was the author. That Addison was guilty of a villainous action is, says Macaulay, highly improbable, that Tickell was capable of a villainy is highly improbable, that the twain were united in a base conspiracy is improbable "out of all whooping". But that Pope's mind, resentful, brooding, and inventive, came to believe in the conspiracy, is, unfortunately, only too natural. We know the figments of all sorts which the imagination of Shelley imposed on him: they were, at least, more romantic than the figments of Pope. In both cases there is a resemblance to the fancy of persecutions which haunts the insane.
Tickell had the honour and happiness to be a friend of Addison, and wrote verses commendatory of his opera, "Rosamond," and of his tragedy, "Cato". His translation of the First Book of the "Iliad" is really good, when we consider the poetic conventions of the age, and the inevitable use of the rhyming heroic couplets. He who would estimate the difficulties of Pope's and Tickell's task, should endeavour, himself, to do a few of the lines of Homer into the classical metre of Queen Anne's day. When Tickell makes Agamemnon, speaking of Chryseis, say
Not Clyt?mnestra boasts a nobler race,
A sweeter temper, or a lovelier face,
he is comically remote from what Agamemnon does say in Homer, and the sweetness of Clyt?mnestra's temper was never famous. Tickell's "Thou fierce-looked talker with a coward soul" is much[Pg 392] less spirited and literal than Pope's "Thou dog in forehead and in heart a deer" ("Drunkard, with eyes of dog and heart of deer," is the literal version). Tickell, more bound by the taste of his age than Pope, shirks the dog and deer. None the less Tickell's version is spirited and lucid; the course of events can be easily followed: the reader is enabled to understand the tragic situation from which the whole epic evolves itself. If Pope had not written, if Tickell had finished his version as well as he began it, he would have satisfied public taste, and won considerable fame.
Tickell, following Addison, was a Whig, "most Whiggish of Whigs," Swift said. This makes his line on "An Original Picture of King Charles I, Taken at the Time of His Trial," all the more curious. The portrait, of which several replicas exist, was mezzotinted from the All Souls' copy in Tickell's day, about 1714. (Bower was the painter.)
How meagre, pale, neglected, worn with care,
What steady sadness and august despair!
says Tickell. The look is one of melancholy scorn rather than of despair. Tickell falls foul of the artist:
Thy steady hands thy savage heart betray,
Near thy bad work the stunn'd spectators faint,
Nor see unmoved what thou unmoved could'st paint.
Bower, in fact, produced the most sympathetic portrait of the King. Tickell proceeds to curse Cromwell, bless the Restoration, and salute Queen Anne as a Stuart.
Not much Whiggery here! But when the Hanoverian dynasty and the Whigs came in, Tickell was strong on the winning side. His "Epistle from a Lady in England to a Gentleman at Avignon," from a Jacobite lady to a gentleman at James's Court, is very prettily written, and the following lines are true.
Then mourn not, hapless prince, thy kingdoms lost;
A crown, though late, thy sacred brows may boast;
Heaven seems, through us, thy empire to decree,
Those who win hearts have given their hearts to thee,
On his side "James reckons half the fair".
[Pg 393]
Say, will he come again?
Nay, Lady, never.
Say, will he never reign?
Ay, Lady, ever,
sings a modern poet, whose heart is true to George? However, Tickell's lady reflects that the Hanoverian sway is good for trade, and in the end prefers London to Avignon.
In 1717 Addison made Tickell his under-secretary—Tickell had always been his "understudy". In 1740 Tickell died, in the enjoyment of one of these lucrative places which rewarded the loyalty of literary Whigs.
With Tickell, the name of Thomas Parnell (1679-1718) goes naturally. He was a minor light among the wits; was befriended by Swift, and is remembered for "The Hermit," "The Night-Piece on Death," and one or two other effusions.