Obiter Dicta Part 3

Pope knew next to no Greek, but then he did not work upon the Greek text.

He had Chapman's translation ever at his elbow, also the version of John Ogilby, which had appeared in 1660--a splendid folio, with ill.u.s.trations by the celebrated Hollar. Dryden had not got farther than the first book of the _Iliad_, and a fragment of the sixth book. A faithful rendering of the exact sense of Homer is not, of course, to be looked for. In the first book Pope describes the captive maid Briseis as looking back. In Homer she does not look back, but in Dryden she does; and Pope followed Dryden, and did not look, at all events, any farther back.

But what really is odd is that in Cowper's translation Briseis looks back too. Now, Cowper had been to a public school, and consequently knew Greek, and made it his special boast that, though dull, he was faithful.

It is easy to make fun of Pope's version, but true scholars have seldom done so. Listen to Professor Conington {76}:--

'It has been, and I hope still is, the delight of every intelligent schoolboy. They read of kings, and heroes, and mighty deeds in language which, in its calm majestic flow, unhasting, unresting, carries them on as irresistibly as Homer's own could do were they born readers of Greek, and their minds are filled with a conception of the heroic age, not indeed strictly true, but almost as near the truth as that which was entertained by Virgil himself.'

Mr. D. G. Rossetti, himself both an admirable translator and a distinguished poet, has in effect laid down the first law of rhythmical translation thus: 'Thou shalt not turn a good poem into a bad one.' Pope kept this law.

Pope was a great adept at working upon other men's stuff. There is hardly anything in which men differ more enormously than in the degree in which they possess this faculty of utilization. Pope's _Essay on Criticism_, which brought him great fame, and was thought a miracle of wit, was the result of much hasty reading, undertaken with the intention of appropriation. Apart from the _limae labor_, which was enormous, and was never grudged by Pope, there was not an hour's really hard work in it. Dryden had begun the work of English criticism with his _Essay on Dramatic Poesy_, and other well-known pieces. He had also translated Boileau's _Art of Poetry_. Then there were the works of those n.o.ble lords, Lord Sheffield, Lord Roscommon, Lord Granville, and the Duke of Buckingham. Pope, who loved a brief, read all these books greedily, and with an amazing quick eye for points. His orderly brain and brilliant wit re-arranged and rendered resplendent the ill-placed and ill-set thoughts of other men.

The same thing is noticeable in the most laboured production of his later life, the celebrated _Essay on Man_. For this he was coached by Lord Bolingbroke.

Pope was accustomed to talk with much solemnity of his ethical system, of which the _Essay on Man_ is but a fragment, but we need not trouble ourselves about it. Dr. Johnson said about _Clarissa Harlowe_ that the man who read it for the story might hang himself; so we may say about the poetry of Pope: the man who reads it for its critical or ethical philosophy may hang himself. We read Pope for pleasure, but a bit of his philosophy may be given:

'Presumptuous man! the reason wouldst thou find, Why formed so weak, so little, and so blind?

First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess, Why formed no weaker, blinder, and no less?

Ask of thy mother Earth why oaks are made Taller and stronger than the weeds they shade!

Or ask of yonder argent fields above Why Jove's satellites are less than Jove!'

To this latter interrogatory presumptuous science, speaking through the mouth of Voltaire, was ready with an answer. If Jupiter were less than his satellites they wouldn't go round him. Pope can make no claim to be a philosopher, and had he been one, Verse would have been a most improper vehicle to convey his speculations. No one willingly fights in handcuffs or wrestles to music. For a man with novel truths to promulgate, or grave moral laws to expound, to postpone doing so until he had hitched them into rhyme would be to insult his mission. Pope's gifts were his wit, his swift-working mind, added to all the cunning of the craft and mystery of composition. He could say things better than other men, and hence it comes that, be he a great poet or a small one, he is a great writer, an English cla.s.sic. What is it that const.i.tutes a great writer?

A bold question, certainly, but whenever anyone asks himself a question in public you may be certain he has provided himself with an answer. I find mine in the writings of a distinguished neighbour of yours, himself, though living, an English cla.s.sic--Cardinal Newman. He says {79}:

'I do not claim for a great author, as such, any great depth of thought, or breadth of view, or philosophy, or sagacity, or knowledge of human nature, or experience of human life--though these additional gifts he may have, and the more he has of them the greater he is,--but I ascribe to him, as his characteristic gift, in a large sense, the faculty of expression. He is master of the two-fold [Greek text], the thought and the word, distinct but inseparable from each other. . . . He always has the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much. If he is brief it is because few words suffice; if he is lavish of them, still each word has its mark, and aids, not embarra.s.ses, the vigorous march of his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but all cannot say, and his sayings pa.s.s into proverbs amongst his people, and his phrases become household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is tessellated with the rich fragments of his language, as we see in foreign lands the marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of modern palaces.' Pope satisfies this definition. He has been dead one hundred and forty-two years; yet, next to Shakespeare, who has been dead two hundred and seventy years, and who was nearer to Pope than Pope is to us, he is the most quoted of English poets, the one who has most enriched our common speech. Horace used, but has long ceased, to be the poet of Parliament; for Mr. Gladstone, who, more than any other, has kept alive in Parliament the scholarly traditions of the past, has never been very Horatian, preferring, whenever the dignity of the occasion seemed to demand Latin, the long roll of the hexameter, something out of Virgil or Lucretius. The new generation of honourable members might not unprofitably turn their attention to Pope. Think how, at all events, the labour members would applaud, not with 'a sad civility,' but with downright cheers, a quotation they actually understood.

Pope is seen at his best in his satires and epistles, and in the mock- heroic. To say that the _Rape of the Lock_ is the best mock-heroic poem in the language is to say nothing; to say that it is the best in the world is to say more than my reading warrants; but to say that it and _Paradise Regained_ are the only two faultless poems, of any length, in English is to say enough.

The satires are savage--perhaps satires should be; but Pope's satires are sometimes what satires should never be--shrill. Dr. Johnson is more to my mind as a sheer satirist than Pope, for in satire character tells more than in any other form of verse. We want a personality behind--a strong, gloomy, brooding personality; soured and savage if you will--nay, as soured and savage as you like, but spiteful never.

Pope became rather by the backing of his friends than from any other cause a party man. Party feeling ran high during the first Georges, and embraced things now outside its ambit--the theatre, for example, and the opera. You remember how excited politicians got over Addison's _Cato_, which, as the work of a Whig, and appearing at a critical time, was thought to be full of a wicked wit and a subtle innuendo future ages have failed to discover amidst its obvious dulness. Pope, who was not then connected with either party, wrote the prologue, and in one of the best letters ever written to n.o.body tells the story of the first night.

'The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party, on the one side the theatre, were echoed back by the Tories on the other, while the author sweated behind the scenes with concern to find their applause proceeded more from the hand than the head. This was the case too of the prologue-writer, who was clapped into a stanch Whig, sore against his will, at almost every two lines. I believe that you have heard that, after all the applause of the opposite faction, my Lord Bolingbroke sent for Booth, who played Cato, into the box between one of the acts, and presented him with fifty guineas, in acknowledgment, as he expressed it, for his defending the cause of liberty so well against a perpetual dictator. The Whigs are unwilling to be distanced this way, as it is said, and, therefore, design a present to the said Cato very speedily. In the meantime they are getting ready as good a sentence as the former on their side. So, betwixt them, it is probable that Cato, as Dr. Garth expressed it, may have something to live upon after he dies.'

Later on music was dragged into the fray. The Court was all for Handel and the Germans; the Prince of Wales and the Tory n.o.bility affected the Italian opera. The Whigs went to the Haymarket; the Tories to the Opera House in Lincoln's Inn Field. In this latter strife Pope took small part; for, notwithstanding his _Ode on St. Cecilia's Day_, he hated music with an entire sincerity. He also affected to hate the drama; but some have thought this accounted for by the fact that, early in his career, he was d.a.m.ned for the farce of _Three Hours after Marriage_, which, after the fas.h.i.+on of our own days, he concocted with another, the co-author in this case being a wit of no less calibre than Gay, the author of _The Beggars' Opera_. The astonished audience bore it as best they might till the last act, when the two lovers, having first inserted themselves respectively into the skins of a mummy and a crocodile, talk at one another across the boards; then they rose in their rage, and made an end of that farce. Their yells were doubtless still in Pope's ears when, years afterwards, he wrote the fine lines--

'While all its throats the gallery extends And all the thunder of the pit ascends, Loud as the wolves on Orca's stormy steep Howl to the roarings of the northern deep.'

Pope, as we have said, became a partisan, and so had his hands full of ready-made quarrels; but his period was certainly one that demanded a satirist. Perhaps most periods do; but I am content to repeat, his did.

Satire like Pope's is essentially modish, and requires a restricted range. Were anyone desirous of satirizing humanity at large I should advise him to check his n.o.ble rage, and, at all events, to begin with his next-door neighbour, who is almost certain to resent it, which humanity will not do. This was Pope's method. It was a corrupt set amongst whom he moved. The gambling in the South Sea stock had been prodigious, and high and low, married and single, town and country, Protestant and Catholic, Whig and Tory, took part in it. One _could_ gamble in that stock. The mania began in February 1720, and by the end of May the price of 100 pounds stock was up to 340 pounds. In July and August it was 950 pounds, and even touched, 1,000 pounds. In the middle of September it was down to 590 pounds, and before the end of the year it had dropped to 125 pounds. Pope himself bought stock when it stood so low as 104 pounds, but he had never the courage to sell, and consequently lost, according to his own account, half his worldly possessions. The Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, also bought stock, but he sold--as did his Most Gracious Majesty the King--at 1,000 pounds. The age was also a scandalous, ill-living age, and Pope, who was a most confirmed gossip and tale-bearer, picked up all that was going. The details of every lawsuit of a personal character were at his finger-ends. Whoever starved a sister, or forged a will, or saved his candle-ends, made a fortune dishonestly, or lost one disgracefully, or was reported to do so, be he citizen or courtier, n.o.ble duke or plump alderman, Mr. Pope was sure to know all about it, and as likely as not to put it into his next satire.

Living, as the poet did, within easy distance of London, he always turned up in a crisis as regularly as a porpoise in a storm, so at least writes a n.o.ble friend. This sort of thing naturally led to quarrels, and the shocking incompleteness of this lecture stands demonstrated by the fact that, though I have almost done, I have as yet said nothing abort Pope's quarrels, which is nearly as bad as writing about St. Paul and leaving out his journeys. Pope's quarrels are celebrated. His quarrel with Mr.

Addison, culminating in the celebrated description, almost every line of which is now part and parcel of the English language; his quarrel with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whom he satirized in the most brutal lines ever written by man of woman; his quarrel with Lord Hervey; his quarrel with the celebrated Sarah, d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough, ought not to be dismissed so lightly, but what can I do? From the d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough Pope is said to have received a sum of money, sometimes stated at 1,000 pounds and sometimes at 3,000 pounds, for consenting to suppress his description of her as Atossa, which, none the less, he published. I do not believe the story; money pa.s.sed between the parties and went to Miss Martha Blount, but it must have been for some other consideration. Sarah Jennings was no fool, and loved money far too well to give it away without security; and how possibly could she hope by a cash payment to erase from the tablets of a poet's memory lines dictated by his hate, or bind by the law of honour a man capable of extorting blackmail? Then Pope quarrelled most terribly with the elder Miss Blount, who, he said, used to beat her mother; then he quarrelled with the mother because she persisted in living with the daughter and pretending to be fond of her.

As for his quarrels with the whole tribe of poor authors, are they not writ large in the four books of the _Dunciad_? Mr. Swinburne is indeed able to find in some, at all events, of these quarrels a species of holy war, waged, as he says, in language which is at all events strong, 'against all the banded b.e.s.t.i.a.lities of all dunces and all dastards, all blackguardly blockheads and all blockheaded blackguards.'

I am sorry to be unable to allow myself to be wound up in Mr. Swinburne's bucket to the height of his argument. There are two kinds of quarrels, the n.o.ble and the ign.o.ble. When John Milton, weary and depressed for a moment in the battle he was fighting in the cause of an enlightened liberty and an instructed freedom, exclaims, with the sad prophet Jeremy, 'Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me, a man of strife and contention,' we feel the sublimity of the quotation, which would not be quite the case were the words uttered by an Irishman returning home with a broken head from Donnybrook Fair. The _Dunciad_ was quite uncalled- for. Even supposing that we admit that Pope was not the aggressor:

'The n.o.blest answer unto such Is kindly silence when they brawl.'

But it is, to say the least of it, doubtful whether Pope did not begin brawling first. Swift, whose misanthropy was genuine, and who begged Pope whenever he thought of the world to give it another lash on his (the Dean's) account, saw clearly the danger of Pope's method, and wrote to him: 'Take care the bad poets do not out-wit you as they have done the good ones in every age; whom they have provoked to transmit their names to posterity. Maevius is as well known as Virgil, and Gildon will be as well known as you if his name gets into your verses; and as for the difference between good and bad fame, it is a mere trifle.' The advice was far too good to be taken. But what has happened? The petty would-be Popes, but for the real Pope, would have been entirely forgotten. As it is, only their names survive in the index to the _Dunciad_; their indecencies and dastardly blockheadisms are as dead as Queen Anne; and if the historian or the moralist seeks an ill.u.s.tration of the coa.r.s.eness and brutality of their style, he finds it only too easily, not in the works of the dead dunces, but in the pages of their persecutor. Pope had none of the grave purpose which makes us, at all events, partially sympathize with Ben Jonson in his quarrels with the poetasters of his day. It is a mere toss-up whose name you may find in the _Dunciad_--a miserable scribbler's or a resplendent scholar's; a tasteless critic's or an immortal wit's. A satirist who places Richard Bentley and Daniel Defoe amongst the Dunces must be content to abate his pretensions to be regarded as a social purge.

Men and women, we can well believe, went in terror of little Mr. Pope.

Well they might, for he made small concealment of their names, and even such as had the luck to escape obvious recognition have been hoisted into infamy by the untiring labours of subsequent commentators. It may, perhaps, be still open to doubt who was the Florid Youth referred to in the Epilogue to the _Satires_:

'And how did, pray, the Florid Youth offend Whose speech you took and gave it to a friend?'

Bowles said it was Lord Hervey, and that the adjective is due to his lords.h.i.+p's well-known practice of painting himself; but Mr. Croker, who knew everything, and was in the habit of contradicting the Duke of Wellington about the battle of Waterloo, says, 'Certainly not. The Florid Youth was young Henry Fox.'

Sometimes, indeed, in our hours of languor and dejection, when

'The heart is sick, And all the wheels of being slow,'

the question forces itself upon us, What can it matter who the Florid Youth was, and who cares how he offended? But this questioning spirit must be checked. 'The proper study of mankind is man,' and that t.i.tle cannot be denied even to a florid youth. Still, as I was saying, people did not like it at the time, and the then Duke of Argyll said, in his place in the House of Lords, that if anybody so much as named him in an invective, he would first run him through the body, and then throw himself--not out of the window, as one was charitably hoping--but on a much softer place--the consideration of their Lords.h.i.+p's House. Some persons of quality, of less truculent aspect than McCallum More, thought to enlist the poet's services, and the d.u.c.h.ess of Buckingham got him to write an epitaph on her deceased son--a feeble lad--to which transaction the poet is thought to allude in the pleasing lines,

'But random praise--the task can ne'er be done, Each mother asks it for her b.o.o.by son.'

Mr. Alderman Barber asked it for himself, and was willing--so at least it was reported--to pay for it at the handsome figure of 4,000 pounds for a single couplet. Pope, however, who was not mercenary, declined to gratify the alderman, who by his will left the poet a legacy of 100 pounds, possibly hoping by this benefaction, if he could not be praised in his lifetime, at all events to escape posthumous abuse. If this were his wish it was gratified, and the alderman sleeps unsung.

Pope greatly enjoyed the fear he excited. With something of exultation he sings:--

'Yes, I am proud: I must be proud to see Men, not afraid of G.o.d, afraid of me; Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne, Yet touched and shamed by ridicule alone.

O sacred weapon! left for Truth's defence, Sole dread of folly, vice, and insolence!

To all but heaven-directed hands denied, The Muse may give thee, but the G.o.ds must guide: Reverent I touch thee, but with honest zeal, To rouse the watchmen of the public weal, To Virtue's work provoke the tardy Hall And goad the prelate slumb'ring in his stall.

Ye tinsel insects! whom a court maintains, That counts your beauties only by your stains, Spin all your cobwebs o'er the eye of day, The Muse's wing shall brush you all away.

All his grace preaches, all his lords.h.i.+p sings, All that makes saints of queens, and G.o.ds of kings,-- All, all but truth drops dead-born from the press, Like the last gazette, or the last address.'

The poet himself was very far from being invulnerable, and he writhed at every sarcasm. There was one of his contemporaries of whom he stood in mortal dread, but whose name he was too frightened even to mention. It is easy to guess who this was. It was Hogarth, who in one of his caricatures had depicted Pope as a hunchback, whitewas.h.i.+ng Burlington House. Pope deemed this the most grievous insult of his life, but he said nothing about it; the spiteful pencil proving more than master of the poisoned pen.

Pope died on May 30th, 1744, bravely and cheerfully enough. His doctor was offering him one day the usual encouragements, telling him his breath was easier, and so on, when a friend entered, to whom the poet exclaimed, 'Here I am, dying of a hundred good symptoms.' In Spence's _Anecdotes_ there is another story, pitched in a higher key: 'Shortly before his death, he said to me, "What's that?" pointing into the air with a very steady regard, and then looked down on me and said, with a smile of great pleasure, and with the greatest softness, "'Twas a vision."' It may have been so. At the very last he consented to allow a priest to be sent for, who attended and administered to the dying man the last sacraments of the Church. The spirit in which he received them cannot be p.r.o.nounced religious. As Cardinal Newman has observed, Pope was an unsatisfactory Catholic.

Pope died in his enemies' day.

Dr. Arbuthnot, who was acknowledged by all his friends to have been the best man who ever lived, be the second-best who he might, had predeceased the poet; and it should be remembered, before we take upon ourselves the task of judging a man we never saw, that Dr. Arbuthnot, who was as shrewd as he was good, had for Pope that warm personal affection we too rarely notice nowadays between men of mature years. Swift said of Arbuthnot: 'Oh! if the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it I would burn my _Travels_.' This may be doubted without damage to the friendly testimony. The terrible Dean himself, whose azure eyes saw through most pretences, loved Pope; but Swift was now worse than dead--he was mad, dying a-top, like the s.h.i.+vered tree he once gazed upon with horror and gloomy forebodings of impending doom.

Many men must have been glad when they read in their scanty journals that Mr. Pope lay dead at his villa in Twickenham. They breathed the easier for the news. Personal satire may be a legitimate, but it is an ugly weapon. The Muse often gives what the G.o.ds do not guide; and though we may be willing that our faults should be scourged, we naturally like to be sure that we owe our sore backs to the blackness of our guilt, and not merely to the fact that we have the proper number of syllables to our names, or because we occasionally dine with an enemy of our scourger.

But living as we do at a convenient distance from Mr. Pope, we may safely wish his days had been prolonged, not necessarily to those of his mother, but to the Psalmist's span, so that he might have witnessed the dawn of a brighter day. 1744 was the nadir of the eighteenth century. With Macbeth the dying Pope might have exclaimed,--

'Renown and grace is dead; The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left in the vault to brag of.'

The feats of arms that have made the first Ministry of the elder Pitt for ever glorious would have appealed to Pope's better nature, and made him forget the scandals of the court and the follies of the town. Who knows but they might have stirred him, for he was not wholly without the true poet's prophetic gift, which dreams of things to come, to foretell, in that animated and animating style of his, which has no rival save glorious John Dryden's, the expansion of England, and how, in far-off summers he should never see, English maidens, living under the Southern Cross, should solace their fluttering hearts before laying themselves down to sleep with some favourite bit from his own _Eloisa to Abelard_?

Whether, in fact, maidens in those lat.i.tudes do read _Eloisa_ before blowing out their candles I cannot say; but Pope, I warrant, would have thought they would. And they might do worse--and better.

Both as a poet and a man Pope had many negations.

'Of love, that sways the sun and all the stars,'

he knew absolutely nothing. Even of the lesser light,

'The eternal moon of love, Under whose motions life's dull billows move,'