English Lands Letters and Kings Part 3

"Where'er you find 'the cooling Western breeze,'

In the next line, it 'whispers through the trees:'

If crystal streams 'with pleasing murmurs creep,'

The reader's threatened (not in vain) with 'sleep;'

Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along."

Next this bustling bit, from _Windsor Forest_:--

"See, from the brake the whirring pheasant springs And mounts exulting on triumphant wings.

Ah! what avail his glossy, varying dyes, His purple crest, and scarlet-circled eyes, The vivid green his s.h.i.+ning plumes unfold, His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold."

And again, this, from the _Rape of the Lock_:--

"Just then, Clarissa drew with tempting grace A two-edged weapon from her s.h.i.+ning case; So ladies in romance a.s.sist their knight, Present the spear, and arm him for the fight, He takes the gift with reverence, and extends The little engine on his fingers' ends;

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This just behind Belinda's neck he spread, As o'er the fragrant steams she bends her head.

Swift to the lock a thousand sprites repair, A thousand wings, by turns, throw back the hair; And thrice they twitched the diamond in her ear, Thrice she looked back, and thrice the foe drew near."

And yet again--this worthier excerpt from the same dainty poem:--

"Fair nymphs, and well-drest youths around her shone But every eye was fixed on her alone.

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; Favors to none, to all she smiles extends; Oft she rejects, but never once offends."

Ten pages of extracts would not show better his amazing attention to details--his quick eye--his gifts in word-craft, and his musical exploitation of his themes. I know that this poet works in harness, and has not the free movement of one who gallops under a loose rein; the couplets fetter him; may be they cramp him; but there is a blithe, strong resonance of true metal, in the clinking chains that bind him.

No, I do not think that Pope is to be laughed out of court, in {38} our day, or in any day, because he labored at form and polish, or because he loved so much the tingle of a rhyme; I think there was something else that tingled in a good deal that he wrote and will continue to tingle so long as Wit is known by its own name.

The good word spoken for him in the _Spectator_--the great printed authority in literary matters--brought him into more intimate a.s.sociation with the Literary Guild of that paper; he wrote for the _Spectator_ on several occasions. An early contribution is that of 1712 (November 10th), where he calls attention to the famous verses which the Emperor Adrian spoke on his death-bed; he says:--

"I was in company the other day with five or six men of learning, who agreed that they showed a gayety unworthy that prince in those circ.u.mstances;" and he quotes the lines:

Animula vagula, blandula Hospes Comes que Corporis Pallidula, rigida, nudula, etc.

"But," he says, "methinks it was by no means a gay, but a very serious soliloquy to his soul at the point of his departure."

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And out of this comment and thought of Pope's, contributed casually (if Pope ever did anything _casually_) to the _Spectator_, came by and by from the poet's anvil, that immortal hymn we all know,--

"Vital spark of heavenly flame, Quit, oh quit, this mortal frame; Trembling, hoping, lingering, flying, Oh the pain, the bliss of dying!"

_The Rape of the Lock._

[Sidenote: Rape of the Lock]

I cited two significant fragments from the _Rape of the Lock_, a poem belonging to Pope's early period, and which is reckoned by most poets and critics,[17] as well as biographers, his masterpiece, and a beautiful work of the highest literary art. I recognize the superior authority, but cannot share the exalted admiration; at least, it does not beget such loving approval as brings one back again and again to its perusal. It does not seem to me to furnish very inspiring reading.

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The setting of this little poem is not large; the story is of a stolen lock of hair, and of the resentments that follow; and if one might venture upon a synopsis of so delicate a feat of workmans.h.i.+p, it might run in this way:--Belinda, the despoiled heroine, sleeps; sprites put dreams in her head and give warning of impending woe. "Shock" (her dog) barks and wakes her; she betakes herself to her toilet--the fairy-fingered sylphs a.s.sisting:

Some thrid the mazy ringlets of her hair; Some hang upon the pendants of her ear,

--all pictured like carving on a cherry-stone. At last, fully equipped, she goes to a fete upon the Thames; pretty glimpses of the river scenes follow; a crazy baron covets a lock of Belinda's hair.

The zephyrs play; day fades; cards come; crowding sprites pile into the game, and twist all into a fairy cable. The covetous baron snips off a lock of Belinda's hair, while she bends over the tea-pot. The nimble sylphs bring from the "Cave of Spleen" a stock of shrieks, and tears, and megrims. Sir Plume ("of amber snuff-box justly vain") champions Belinda, and demands satisfaction of the {41} ravisher--which he does not win; so the battle rages--"Fans clap, silks rustle, and tough whalebones crack," and in the hurly-burly the stolen lock gets wafted into "lunar spheres," and comet-like, closes the s.h.i.+ning tale:

"This lock the muse [thus] consecrates to Fame And midst the stars inscribes Belinda's name."

Yet Belinda's sovereignty is of an ign.o.ble sort; her tiara made up of pins and pomades; indeed the women all are as small as the sylphs; toy creatures, and creatures of toys; no n.o.bility, in or about them; and very much to make an honest, self-respecting woman of our time fling down the silvery poem with a wearisome distaste.

All this is said with a thorough recognition of its art--its amazing dexterities of verse--its playful leaps of fancy--its bright s.h.i.+mmer of over-nature; and yet those gossamer gnomes seem to me like an intrusion; I cannot forget that they were an afterthought of Pope himself; I cannot bring myself to think of the charming fairy-folk of Fletcher, or of Drayton's _Nymphidia_, or of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ wallowing in pomades, {42} and straining at whalebone stays!

These live through an eternal frolic in the air; those--of the _Rape of the Lock_--lie in a literary show-case, like a taxidermist's trophies.

In the sobered time of life, when the iris hues have only fitful play, I think a man goes away from these earlier poems of Pope (if he reads them) with new zest, to those wonderful metric condensations of old truths, which flash and burn along the lines of his moral essays.

There could be few more helpful rhetorical lessons, for boy or girl, than the effort to pack some of Pope's stinging couplets, or decades of lines, into an equal number of lines in prose; the difficulties would be great indeed and would vitalize the lesson; and the lesson, I think, would be far fuller of profitable ends, than the old "parsing"

exercise, and syntactic a.n.a.lysis and description of sentences according to the nomenclature of Mr. Lindley Murray or of Mr. Somebody-else.

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_Pope's Homer, and Life at Twickenham_.

[Sidenote: Homer of Pope.]

Notwithstanding his much writing, Pope in those early days under the beeches of Windsor forest, was not winning such financial rewards as his friends thought he deserved. The _Spectator_ did not pay much money for little poetic trifles--such as the _Messiah_; and Jacob Tonson was the screw which some publishers are. There can be no doubt that the poet, with his fine tastes, felt the restraints of a limited income; his old father, who perhaps did not carry sharp business habits into his retirement, had been compelled to leave the country house of Binfield, and had gone over to a suburban street dwelling near to Chiswick. In this emergency, (if emergency it were,) was it not the oddest thing in the world that his friends should have advised a translation of Homer?

Yet they did; and so this dauntless young fellow, not over-critical in his Greek knowledge, but with an abounding sense of the marvellous beauties that lay in the old Homeric hexameters, {44} sets about his task; and after five years' toil accomplishes it in such a way as makes it probable that there can never be an English Homer that will quite match it. There are juster ones; there are faithfuller ones; but not one that has been so enduringly popular. Steeping himself in the mythologies and the Trojan traditions, he has grafted thereupon his stock of British word-craft: Ajax, Achilles, and the rest range to their places in the martial clank of his couplets, with a life and charm which, if not imbued with Homeric limpidities and melodies, possess an engaging picturesqueness that belongs to few long English epics.

And the poem took: that trenchant Dean Swift strode into the ante-rooms of the great men of Court, and swore that he must have a hundred or a thousand pounds subscribed for the new Homer of Mr. Pope; and he got it; Mr. Pope was the fas.h.i.+on.

Up to that time in the whole history of English literature there had been no such payment for literary wares as accrued to the author of the new Homer--the sum reaching, for both Iliad and {45} Odyssey, some 9,000; with which the shrewd poet bought an annuity (cheaper then than now) of some 500, and a long lease of the Twickenham house and gardens; where, thereafter, amidst his willows and his grottos, he lived until his death.

The house[18]--if indeed any part be now the same--has been built over and enlarged, and has a jaunty suburban villa pretension that does not look Homeric; but the grotto, or tunnel, which he cut under the high road running parallel with the Thames, and through which he might pa.s.s un.o.bserved from garden to garden and from his house to the river, is still to be seen there; and trees of his planting still hang their limbs over the pretty greensward that goes down in gentle slope to the Thames banks. He put the same polish upon his grounds he did upon his verse: his grotto flashed with curious spars, gla.s.s jewels, and prismatic tinted sh.e.l.ls; his walks were decorously {46} paved and rolled and his turf shorn to a nicety. He entertained there in his thrifty way, watching his butler very sharply, and by reason of his infirmities, was very measured in his wine-drinking. Swift, who used to come and pa.s.s days with him, may have made the gla.s.ses jingle: and there were other worthy friends who, when they came for a dinner, kept the poet in a tremor of unrest. The Prince of Wales, after the Georges of Hanover had come in, used sometimes to honor the poet with a visit; and the rich and powerful Bolingbroke--what time he lived at Battersea--used to come up in his barge, landing at the garden entrance--as most great visitors did--and discuss with him those faiths, dogmas, truisms, and splendid generalities which afterward took form in the famous _Essay on Man_.

Though the Twickenham home was on a great high road from London to Teddington and Hampton Court, and the greater high road of the river, it had, like all English suburban places now, its high enclosing walls that gave privacy; and the river sh.o.r.es had their skirting of rhododendrons and willows and great beds of laurestina, so that {47} the weak, misshapen poet might take his walks un.o.bserved. He had his vanities, but he did not love to be pointed at. He carried a mind of extreme sensitiveness under that dwarfed figure; and is mad--maybe, sometimes, with destiny, that has crippled him so; and bites that thin lip of his till the blood starts. But he does not waste force or pride on repinings; he feels an alt.i.tude in that supple mind of his which lifts him above the bad lines of portraits or figures. He knows that the ready hand and brain, and the faculty of verse which comes tripping to his tongue, and the wit which flashes through and through his utterance, will make for him--has made for him--a path through whatever beleaguerments of sense, straight up and on to the gates of the Temple of Fame.

[Sidenote: Pope's vanities.]