The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  The bitter conflicts of Whigs and Tories, of Hanoverians and Jacobites, and the increasing involvement of England in Continental and colonial affairs whetted the appetite for news, and made the newspaper a force in British history. In 1714 there were eleven newspapers regularly published in London, most of them weekly; in 1733 there were seventeen, in 1776 fifty-three. Many of them were subsidized by political factions; for as demos raised its voice moneyed minorities bought newspapers to dictate its thoughts. Nearly all newspapers contained advertisements. The Daily Advertiser, founded in 1730, was at first given over entirely to advertisements; but soon, like our morning Leviathans, it added a fillip of news to bolster its circulation and raise its advertising fees. Some historic magazines were born in this period: The Craftsman (1726), Bolingbroke’s scourge of Walpole; The Grub Street Journal (1730–37), the sharp tongue of Pope; The Gentleman’s Magazine (1731), which gave Johnson a berth; and The Edinburgh Review (1755), which died only temporarily in 1756. Many English newspapers and journals are still alive after two hundred years of publication.

  All these periodicals—daily, weekly, or monthly—gave the press a power that added something to the perils and vitality of British life. Robert Walpole, while forbidding the publication of parliamentary debates, allowed journalists to attack him with all the virulence of eighteenth-century literature. Montesquieu, coming from censored France, marveled at the liberty with which Grub Street pelted Downing Street with poisoned ink.1 A member of Parliament complained to the Commons in 1738 that

  the people of Great Britain are governed by a power that never was heard of, as a supreme authority, in any age or country before. This power, Sir, does not consist in the absolute will of the prince, in the direction of Parliament, in the strength of an army, in the influence of the clergy; it is the government of the press. The stuff which our weekly newspapers are filled with is received with greater reverence than Acts of Parliament; and the sentiments of these scribblers have more weight with the multitude than the opinion of the best politicians in the Kingdom.2

  Printers worked with new fury to meet the widened demand. In London there were 150, in all England three hundred; two of them in this age, William Caslon and John Baskerville, left their names on fonts of type. Printing, publishing, and bookselling were still in most cases united in the same firm. One living firm, Longmans, was born in 1724. The word publisher usually denoted the author; the man who brought out the book was the bookseller. Some booksellers, like Johnson’s father, carried their wares to the fairs, or peddled them from town to town, opening a stall on market days. Their charge for a bound volume varied from two to five shillings; but a shilling in 1750 was worth approximately $1.25. Parliament had passed a copyright act in 1710, which secured to an author or his assigns the property rights to his book for fourteen years, with an extension to twenty-eight years if he survived the first period. This law, however, protected him only in the United Kingdom; printers in Ireland and Holland could publish piratical editions and (till 1739) sell them in England in competition with the bookseller who had paid for the book.

  Under these conditions of risk the booksellers drove hard bargains with authors. Usually the writer sold his copyright for a flat sum; if the volume went unexpectedly well, the bookseller might give the author an added sum, but this was not obligatory. For a book by a known author the fee ranged from one hundred to two hundred pounds; Hume received the exceptionally high price of five hundred pounds per volume for his History of England. An author might take subscriptions for his work, as Pope did for his translation of the Iliad; usually in such cases the subscriber paid half the purchase price in advance and the other half on delivery, and the author paid the printer.

  The great majority of authors lived in a galling poverty. Simon Ockley, after working for a decade on his History of the Saracens (1708–57), had to complete it in a debtors’ prison; Richard Savage used to tramp the streets at night for lack of a lodging; Johnson was poor for thirty years before he became the sovereign of English letters. Grub (now Milton) Street was the historic habitat of “poetry and poverty” (Johnson’s phrase), where hack writers—journalists, translators, compilers, proofreaders, magazine contributors, editors—sometimes slept three in a bed and dressed in a blanket for want of other clothes. This poverty was due not so much to the tightness of booksellers and the indifference of Walpole as to the unprecedented glutting of the literary market by mediocre talents underselling one another. The predominance of failures over successes in the “word business” shared with the divorce of literature from aristocratic patronage in debasing the social status of authors. At the same time when in France poets, philosophers, and historians were being welcomed into the fanciest homes and bosoms, in England—with two or three exceptions—they were excluded from “polite society” as unwashed bohemians. Perhaps that was why Congreve begged Voltaire not to class him as a writer. Alexander Pope challenged the prejudices of his time by claiming to be both a poet and a gentleman. By the latter word he meant a man of “gentle birth,” not a man of gentle ways. On the contrary!

  II. ALEXANDER POPE: 1688–1744

  Johnson, who despised biographies that begin with a pedigree and end with a funeral, began his remarkable biography of Pope by telling us that “Alexander Pope was born in London May 22, 1688, of parents whose rank or status was never ascertained.”3 The father was a linen merchant who made a modest fortune and then retired to Binfield, near Windsor Forest. Both parents were Roman Catholics, and the year of Pope’s birth was also the year when the dethronement of James II dashed the hopes of Catholics for the abatement of the anti-Catholic laws. The mother was especially gentle to the boy, who was her only child. He inherited from her a tendency to headaches, and from his father such curvature of the spine that he never grew beyond four and a half feet in height.

  His early education was entrusted to Catholic priests, who made him proficient in Latin, and less so in Greek; other tutors taught him French and Italian. As his religion closed the universities and the professions to him, he continued his studies at home; and as his crooked figure and frail health handicapped him for active enterprise, his parents indulged his fondness for writing poetry. He tells us that

  As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,

  I lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came.4

  At twelve he had a glimpse of Dryden pontificating in Will’s Coffeehouse; the sight stirred in him a wild desire for literary glory. At sixteen he composed some Pastorals which circulated in manuscript and won intoxicating praise; they were accepted for publication in 1709. Then, in 1711, in all the ripe wisdom of his twenty-three years, he astonished the wits of London with an Essay on Criticism in which—even while warning authors,

  A little learning is a dangerous thing;

  Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring5

  of the Muses—he laid down with magisterial finality the rules of literary art. Here Horace’s Ars poetica and Boileau’s Art poétique were digested into 744 lines of good sense marvelously, often monosyllabically, phrased—

  What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.6

  The youth had a flair for epigram, for compressing reams of wisdom in a line, and rounding each idea with a rhyme. He took his versification from Dryden, but his theory from Boileau. Having leisure to file his verse, he readily accepted the classic counsel to perfect the form, to make the goblet more precious than its wine. Though still professing the Catholic faith, he adopted Boileau’s doctrine that literature should be reason aptly dressed. Nature yes, but nature tamed by man; feeling yes, but chastened by intelligence. And what better guide could there be to such controlled and chiseled art than the practice of the ancient poets and orators, their resolution to be rational, and to make each part of every work an orderly element integrated into a harmonious whole? Here was the classic tradition, coming down through Italy and France, through Petrarch and Corneille, and now conquering England through Alexander Pope, as it seemed to Voltaire to h
ave conquered Shakespeare through Addison’s Cato, and as classic architecture, coming down through Palladio and Serlio, through Perrault and Wren, had overlaid or overridden Gothic fantasies and exaltation with sober pediments and calm colonnades. So was formed the young poet’s concept of the classic mind functioning in an ideal critic:

  But where’s the man, who counsel can bestow,

  Still pleased to teach, and yet not proud to know?

  Unbias’d or by favor or by spite;

  Not dully prepossessed, nor blindly right;

  Though learn’d, well-bred, and though well-bred, sincere;

  Modestly bold and humanly severe;

  Who to a friend his faults can freely show,

  And gladly praise the merits of a foe?

  Blest with a taste exact yet unconfined,

  A knowledge both of books and human kind;

  Gen’rous converse; a soul exempt from pride;

  And love to praise, with reason on his side?7

  There were a few such critics ready to hail such verse and measured virtue from a lad of twenty-three; so Addison, who must have felt himself here described, offered the poet, in No. 253 of The Spectator, a precious acclaim soon to be forgotten in wordy wars. Another poet, John Dennis, author of the play Appius and Virginia, thought himself abused in Pope’s uncautious lines,

  But Appius reddens at each word you speak,

  And stares, tremendous, with a threatening eye,

  Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry,8

  and countered with Reflections, Critical and Satirical (1711). He picked real flaws in Pope’s thought and diction, and served them up in peppered sauce. He described Pope as an ugly hypocrite shaped like Cupid’s bow or a hunchbacked toad, and congratulated him on not having been born in classic Greece, which would have exposed him at birth for his deformity.9 Pope licked his wounds and bided his time.

  He followed up his success by publishing The Rape of the Lock (1712). It was a frank imitation of Boileau’s Le Lutrin (1674), but by general consent it excelled its original. Lord Robert Petre had expressed his enthusiasm for Mrs. Arabella Fermor by cutting off, and running off with, a lock of her lovely hair. A coolness ensued between raper and rapee. A Mr. Caryll suggested to Pope that Arabella’s resentment might soften if the poet would tell the story in humorous verse and present the poem to her. It was so done and it so transpired; Mrs. Fermor forgave the lord, and consented to the publication of the poem. But then Pope, against the advice of Addison, enlarged and cluttered the lay with mock-heroic machinery of participating sylphs, salamanders, nymphs, and gnomes. This “light militia of the lower sky” fell in with the fancies of the time, and the amended Rape proved a success with everyone but Dennis. George Berkeley paused in his campaign against matter to compliment the author on the flexibility of his Muse. All the felicity of Pope’s versification, and his inexhaustible mint of imagery and phrase make the poem sparkle like the gems in “Belinda’s” hair. He describes with feminine learning the cosmetics with which a fairy arms the heroine for the wars of love, and he lists with sarcastic equivalents the vital issues of her day:

  Whether the nymph [Belinda-Arabella] shall break Diana’s law [of virginity],

  Or some frail china-jar receive a flaw;

  Or stain her honor, or her new brocade;

  Forget her prayers, or miss a masquerade;

  Or lose her heart, or necklace, at a ball …10

  Belinda joins the gossip and gambling of titled company at Hampton Court, where

  At every word a reputation dies;11

  and the poet marshals his artistry to recount a game of cards. Then, as Belinda bends to drink, the lusty baron snips her curl and steals away (this iambic flux is catching). Furious, she pursues and finds him, and throws a charge of snuff into his face;

  Sudden, with starting tears each eye o’erflows,

  And the high dome re-echoes to his nose.12

  Meanwhile the gnomes, or sylphs, or salamanders themselves rape the lock and draw it, trailing clouds of glory, to the skies, where it becomes a comet outcoruscating Berenice’s hair.

  All this delighted the lords and ladies, the clubs and coffeehouses, of London; Pope found himself hailed as the cleverest poet in England; and all other poets became his foes. He added nothing to his fame with wearisome verses describing Windsor Forest (1713); nor did the Whigs, victorious in 1714, forget that in that poem he revealed his Catholic sympathies for the fallen dynasty.13 But he recaptured his audience in 1717 by carving into couplets the fabled letters of Héloïse and Abélard. “Eloïsa,” self-immured in a nunnery, bids the emasculated “Abelard” flaunt the laws of Church and state and come to her arms:

  Come, if thou dar’st, all charming as thou art!

  Oppose thyself to Heaven, dispute my heart;

  Come, with one glance of those deluding eyes

  Blot out each bright idea of the skies; …

  Snatch me, just mounting, from the bless’d abode;

  Assist the friends, and tear me from my God!

  Then in another mood she tells him,

  No, fly me, far as pole from pole;

  Rise Alps between us! and whole oceans roll!

  Ah, come not, write not, think not once of me,

  Nor share one pang of all I felt for thee.14

  Yet she trusts that in her dying hour he may come to her, not as a lover but as a priest:

  In sacred vestments may’st thou stand,

  The hallow’d taper trembling in thy hand,

  Present the cross before my lifted eye,

  Teach me at once, and learn of me, to die.15

  Like almost every poet in those days Pope dreamed of writing an epic. He had begun one at the age of twelve. Later, studying Homer, the thought came to him that he might translate the Iliad into those “heroic couplets” that seemed to be almost his natural speech. He asked his friends about the idea; they approved. One of them, Jonathan Swift, introduced him to Har-ley, Bolingbroke, and other heads of government, hoping to get him a sustaining sinecure. Failing in this, he undertook to get subscriptions that would support the new Alexander prancing over Troy. Strategically placed between place seekers and ministry, Swift proclaimed that “the best poet in England was Mr. Pope, a Papist, who had begun a translation of Homer into English verse, for which he must have them all subscribe; for the author shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for him!”16Pope proposed to render the Iliad in six volumes quarto, for six guineas ($180?) the set. Despite this lordly price the subscriptions were so many, and the enthusiasm so great, that Bernard Lintot, bookseller, agreed to pay Pope two hundred pounds for each volume, and to supply him gratuitously with copies for his subscribers. As the 575 subscribers took 654 sets, Pope earned £5,320 ($148,960?) for the Iliad. No author in England had yet received so handsome a sum. The first volume, containing four cantos, appeared in 1715. It encountered unexpected competition from the publication, on the same day, of a translation of Canto I by Thomas Tickell. Addison lauded Tickell’s version, which Pope took to be really Addison’s; he felt the simultaneous publication to be an unfriendly act, and added Addison to his foes.

  If scholarship had been the only test, Pope’s translation would have deserved little praise. He had only a modest knowledge of Greek; he had to engage scholastic help; he accomplished most of his task by collating earlier translations and rephrasing them in the iambic-pentameter couplets that were his special forte. Bentley, prince of then living Hellenists, judged the performance well: “A pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.”17 The couplets and the drumbeat of their rhymes, the balanced phrases, clauses, and antitheses, halted the swift and surging style of the Greek hexameters. Nevertheless there was a marching grandeur, and a resource of language, in those marvelously sustained verses that carried them over Bentley’s protests through the eighteenth into the nineteenth century as the favored translation of the Iliad. “The noblest version of poetry that the world has ever seen,” said John
son;18 no other translation would ever equal it, said Gray.19 So Britain judged until Keats looked into Chapman’s Homer, and Wordsworth called down a plague upon the pompous artificial style that pleased so many in England’s Augustan Age.

  Pope’s Iliad was published in 1715–20. Its success brought competing booksellers to his door. One of them begged him to edit Shakespeare’s plays; he foolishly agreed, blind to the chasm that divided him from Shakespeare in mind and art. He toiled impatiently at the uncongenial task; the edition appeared in 1725, and was soon riddled as incompetent by Lewis Theobald, the best Shakespearean scholar of the day. Pope crucified him in The Dunciad.

  Meanwhile Lintot persuaded him to translate the Odyssey, offering a hundred pounds for each of five volumes; and subscribers took 819 sets. But now, lacking the stimulus of youth and need, Pope tired of cutting couplets, and delegated half the work to two Cambridge scholars, who soon learned to counterfeit his style. He had forewarned subscribers that he would use aides; but in publishing his Odyssey (1725–26)—far inferior to his Iliad—he credited these assistants with five books of the twenty-four; actually they had translated twelve.20 He paid them £ 770; he himself netted £3,500, rightly feeling that his name had sold the book. The two translations made him financially independent. Now, “thanks to Homer,” he said, he could “live and thrive indebted to no prince or peer alive.”21

  In 1718 he bought a villa at Twickenham, with a garden of five acres sloping to the Thames. He designed the garden in “natural” style, avoiding the classical regularity that he practiced in his verse; “a tree,” he said, “is a nobler object than a prince in his coronation robes.”22 From his house he had a tunnel dug under an intervening highway to emerge into the garden; this “grotto” he decorated fancifully with shells, crystals, coral, petrifacts, mirrors, and little obelisks. In that cool retreat he entertained many famous friends—Swift, Gay, Congreve, Bolingbroke, Arbuthnot, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Princess Caroline, and Voltaire. Lady Mary was his neighbor in what they both called “Twitnam”; Bolingbroke lived at Dawley, close by; London was only eleven miles away, by a pleasant boat ride on the Thames; and nearer still were the royal palaces at Richmond, Hampton Court, and Kew.