Alexander Pope - Delphi Poets Series

by Alexander Pope

  I have mentioned these poems here, because they seem to be the development of the rhetorical vein which appeared in the earlier work. But I have passed over another work which has sometimes been regarded as his masterpiece. A Lord Petre had offended a Miss Fermor by stealing a lock of her hair. She thought that he showed more gallantry than courtesy, and some unpleasant feeling resulted between the families. Pope’s friend, Caryll, thought that it might be appeased if the young poet would turn the whole affair into friendly ridicule. Nobody, it might well be supposed, had a more dexterous touch; and a brilliant trifle from his hands, just fitted for the atmosphere of drawing-rooms, would be a convenient peace-offering, and was the very thing in which he might be expected to succeed. Pope accordingly set to work at a dainty little mock-heroic, in which he describes, in playful mockery of the conventional style, the fatal coffee-drinking at Hampton, in which the too daring peer appropriated the lock. The poem received the praise which it well deserved; for certainly the young poet had executed his task to a nicety. No more brilliant, sparkling, vivacious trifle, is to be found in our literature than the Rape of the Lock, even in this early form. Pope received permission from the lady to publish it in Lintot’s Miscellany in 1712, and a wider circle admired it, though it seems that the lady and her family began to think that young Mr. Pope was making rather too free with her name. Pope meanwhile, animated by his success, hit upon a singularly happy conception, by which he thought that the poem might be rendered more important. The solid critics of those days were much occupied with the machinery of epic poems; the machinery being composed of the gods and goddesses who, from the days of Homer, had attended to the fortunes of heroes. He had hit upon a curious French book, the Comte de Gabalis, which professes to reveal the mysteries of the Rosicrucians, and it occurred to him that the elemental sylphs and gnomes would serve his purpose admirably. He spoke of his new device to Addison, who administered — and there is not the slightest reason for doubting his perfect sincerity and good meaning — a little dose of cold water. The poem, as it stood, was a “delicious little thing” — merum sal — and it would be a pity to alter it. Pope, however, adhered to his plan, made a splendid success, and thought that Addison must have been prompted by some mean motive. The Rape of the Lock appeared in its new form, with sylphs and gnomes, and an ingenious account of a game at cards and other improvements, in 1714. Pope declared, and critics have agreed, that he never showed more skill than in the remodelling of this poem; and it has ever since held a kind of recognised supremacy amongst the productions of the drawing-room muse.

  The reader must remember that the so-called heroic style of Pope’s period is now hopelessly effete. No human being would care about machinery and the rules of Bossu, or read without utter weariness the mechanical imitations of Homer and Virgil which were occasionally attempted by the Blackmores and other less ponderous versifiers. The shadow grows dim with the substance. The burlesque loses its point when we care nothing for the original; and, so far, Pope’s bit of filigree-work, as Hazlitt calls it, has become tarnished. The very mention of beaux and belles suggests the kind of feeling with which we disinter fragments of old-world finery from the depths of an ancient cabinet, and even the wit is apt to sound wearisome. And further, it must be allowed to some hostile critics that Pope has a worse defect. The poem is, in effect, a satire upon feminine frivolity. It continues the strain of mockery against hoops and patches and their wearers, which supplied Addison and his colleagues with the materials of so many Spectators. I think that even in Addison there is something which rather jars upon us. His persiflage is full of humour and kindliness, but underlying it there is a tone of superiority to women which is sometimes offensive. It is taken for granted that a woman is a fool, or at least should be flattered if any man condescends to talk sense to her. With Pope this tone becomes harsher, and the merciless satirist begins to show himself. In truth, Pope can be inimitably pungent, but he can never be simply playful. Addison was too condescending with his pretty pupils; but under Pope’s courtesy there lurks contempt, and his smile has a disagreeable likeness to a sneer. If Addison’s manner sometimes suggests the blandness of a don who classes women with the inferior beings unworthy of the Latin grammar, Pope suggests the brilliant wit whose contempt has a keener edge from his resentment against fine ladies blinded to his genius by his personal deformity.

  Even in his dedication, Pope, with unconscious impertinence, insults his heroine for her presumable ignorance of his critical jargon. His smart epigrams want but a slight change of tone to become satire. It is the same writer who begins an essay on women’s characters by telling a woman that her sex is a compound of

  Matter too soft a lasting mask to bear; And best distinguished by black, brown, or fair,

  and communicates to her the pleasant truth that

  Every woman is at heart a rake.

  Women, in short, are all frivolous beings, whose one genuine interest is in love-making. The same sentiment is really implied in the more playful lines in the Rape of the Lock. The sylphs are warned by omens that some misfortune impends; but they don’t know what.

  Whether the nymph shall break Diana’s law, Or some frail china jar receive a flaw; Or stain her honour or her new brocade, Forget her prayers or miss a masquerade; Or lose her heart or necklace at a ball, Or whether heaven has doom’d that Shock must fall.

  We can understand that Miss Fermor would feel such raillery to be equivocal. It may be added, that an equal want of delicacy is implied in the mock-heroic battle at the end, where the ladies are gifted with an excess of screaming power: —

  ‘Restore the lock!’ she cries, and all around ‘Restore the lock,’ the vaulted roofs rebound — Not fierce Othello in so loud a strain Roar’d for the handkerchief that caused his pain.

  These faults, though far from trifling, are yet felt only as blemishes in the admirable beauty and brilliance of the poem. The successive scenes are given with so firm and clear a touch — there is such a sense of form, the language is such a dexterous elevation of the ordinary social twaddle into the mock-heroic, that it is impossible not to recognize a consummate artistic power. The dazzling display of true wit and fancy blinds us for the time to the want of that real tenderness and humour, which would have softened some harsh passages, and given a more enduring charm to the poetry. It has, in short, the merit that belongs to any work of art which expresses in the most finished form the sentiment characteristic of a given social phase; one deficient in many of the most ennobling influences, but yet one in which the arts of converse represent a very high development of shrewd sense refined into vivid wit. And we may, I think, admit that there is some foundation for the genealogy that traces Pope’s Ariel back to his more elevated ancestor in the Tempest. The later Ariel, indeed, is regarded as the soul of a coquette, and is almost an allegory of the spirit of poetic fancy in slavery to polished society.

  Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain While clogg’d he beats his silken wings in vain.

  Pope’s Ariel is a parody of the ethereal being into whom Shakspeare had refined the ancient fairy; but it is a parody which still preserves a sense of the delicate and graceful. The ancient race which appeared for the last time in this travesty of the fashion of Queen Anne, still showed some touch of its ancient beauty. Since that time no fairy has appeared without being hopelessly childish or affected.

  Let us now turn from the poems to the author’s personal career during the same period. In the remarkable autobiographic poem called the Epistle to Arbuthnot, Pope speaks of his early patrons and friends, and adds —

  Soft were my numbers; who could take offence When pure description held the place of sense? Like gentle Fanny’s was my flow’ry theme, A painted mistress or a purling stream. Yet then did Gildon draw his venal quill — I wish’d the man a dinner, and sat still. Yet then did Dennis rave in furious fret; I never answer’d, — I was not in debt.

  Pope’s view of his own career suggests the curious problem: how it came to
pass that so harmless a man should be the butt of so many hostilities? How could any man be angry with a writer of gentle pastorals and versified love-letters? The answer of Pope was, that this was the normal state of things. “The life of a wit,” he says, in the preface to his works, “is a warfare upon earth;” and the warfare results from the hatred of men of genius natural to the dull. Had any one else made such a statement, Pope would have seen its resemblance to the complaint of the one reasonable juryman overpowered by eleven obstinate fellows. But we may admit that an intensely sensitive nature is a bad qualification for a public career. A man who ventures into the throng of competitors without a skin will be tortured by every touch, and suffer the more if he turns to retaliate.

  Pope’s first literary performances had not been so harmless as he suggests. Amongst the minor men of letters of the day was the surly John Dennis. He was some thirty years Pope’s senior; a writer of dreary tragedies which had gained a certain success by their Whiggish tendencies, and of ponderous disquisitions upon critical questions, not much cruder in substance though heavier in form than many utterances of Addison or Steele. He could, however, snarl out some shrewd things when provoked, and was known to the most famous wits of the day. He had corresponded with Dryden, Congreve, and Wycherley, and published some of their letters. Pope, it seems, had been introduced to him by Cromwell, but they had met only two or three times. When Pope had become ashamed of following Wycherley about like a dog, he would soon find out that a Dennis did not deserve the homage of a rising genius. Possibly Dennis had said something of Pope’s Pastorals, and Pope had probably been a witness, perhaps more than a mere witness, to some passage of arms in which Dennis lost his temper. In mere youthful impertinence he introduced an offensive touch in the Essay upon Criticism. It would be well, he said, if critics could advise authors freely, —

  But Appius reddens at each word you speak, And stares, tremendous, with a threatening eye, Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry.

  The name Appius referred to Dennis’s tragedy of Appius and Virginia, a piece now recollected solely by the fact that poor Dennis had invented some new thunder for the performance; and by his piteous complaint against the actors for afterwards “stealing his thunder,” had started a proverbial expression. Pope’s reference stung Dennis to the quick. He replied by a savage pamphlet, pulling Pope’s essay to pieces, and hitting some real blots, but diverging into the coarsest personal abuse. Not content with saying in his preface that he was attacked with the utmost falsehood and calumny by a little affected hypocrite, who had nothing in his mouth but truth, candour, and good-nature, he reviled Pope for his personal defects; insinuated that he was a hunch-backed toad; declared that he was the very shape of the bow of the god of love; that he might be thankful that he was born a modern, for had he been born of Greek parents his life would have been no longer than that of one of his poems, namely, half a day; and that his outward form, however like a monkey’s, could not deviate more from the average of humanity than his mind. These amenities gave Pope his first taste of good savage slashing abuse. The revenge was out of all proportion to the offence. Pope, at first, seemed to take the assault judiciously. He kept silence, and simply marked some of the faults exposed by Dennis for alteration. But the wound rankled, and when an opportunity presently offered itself, Pope struck savagely at his enemy. To show how this came to pass, I must rise from poor old Dennis to a more exalted literary sphere.

  The literary world, in which Dryden had recently been, and Pope was soon to be, the most conspicuous figure, was for the present under the mild dictatorship of Addison. We know Addison as one of the most kindly and delicate of humourists, and we can perceive the gentleness which made him one of the most charming of companions in a small society. His sense of the ludicrous saved him from the disagreeable ostentation of powers which were never applied to express bitterness of feeling or to edge angry satire. The reserve of his sensitive nature made access difficult, but he was so transparently modest and unassuming that his shyness was not, as is too often the case, mistaken for pride. It is easy to understand the posthumous affection which Macaulay has so eloquently expressed, and the contemporary popularity which, according to Swift, would have made people unwilling to refuse him had he asked to be king. And yet I think that one cannot read Addison’s praises without a certain recalcitration, like that which one feels in the case of the model boy who wins all the prizes, including that for good conduct. It is hard to feel very enthusiastic about a virtue whose dictates coincide so precisely with the demands of decorum, and which leads by so easy a path to reputation and success. Popularity is more often significant of the tact which makes a man avoid giving offence, than of the warm impulses of a generous nature. A good man who mixes with the world ought to be hated, if not to hate. But whatever we may say against his excessive goodness, Addison deserved and received universal esteem, which in some cases became enthusiastic. Foremost amongst his admirers was the warm-hearted, reckless, impetuous Steele, the typical Irishman; and amongst other members of his little senate — as Pope called it — were Ambrose Philips and Tickell, young men of letters and sound Whig politics, and more or less competitors of Pope in literature. When Pope was first becoming known in London the Whigs were out of power; Addison and his friends were generally to be found at Button’s Coffee-house in the afternoon, and were represented to the society of the time by the Spectator, which began in March, 1711, and appeared daily to the end of 1712. Naturally, the young Pope would be anxious to approach this famous clique, though his connexions lay in the first instance amongst the Jacobite and Catholic families. Steele, too, would be glad to welcome so promising a contributor to the Spectator and its successor the Guardian.

  Pope, we may therefore believe, was heartily delighted when, some months after Dennis’s attack, a notice of his Essay upon Criticism appeared in the Spectator, December 20, 1711. The reviewer censured some attacks upon contemporaries — a reference obviously to the lines upon Dennis — which the author had admitted into his “very fine poem;” but there were compliments enough to overbalance this slight reproof. Pope wrote a letter of acknowledgment to Steele, overflowing with the sincerest gratitude of a young poet on his first recognition by a high authority. Steele, in reply, disclaimed the article, and promised to introduce Pope to its real author, the great Addison himself. It does not seem that the acquaintance thus opened with the Addisonians ripened very rapidly, or led to any considerable results. Pope, indeed, is said to have written some Spectators. He certainly sent to Steele his Messiah, a sacred eclogue in imitation of Virgil’s Pollio. It appeared on May 14th, 1712, and is one of Pope’s dexterous pieces of workmanship, in which phrases from Isaiah are so strung together as to form a good imitation of the famous poem, which was once supposed to entitle Virgil to some place among the inspired heralds of Christianity. Pope sent another letter or two to Steele, which look very much like intended contributions to the Spectator, and a short letter about Hadrian’s verses to his soul, which appeared in November, 1712. When, in 1713, the Guardian succeeded the Spectator, Pope was one of Steele’s contributors, and a paper by him upon dedications appeared as the fourth number. He soon gave a more remarkable proof of his friendly relations with Addison.

  It is probable that no first performance of a play upon the English stage ever excited so much interest as that of Addison’s Cato. It was not only the work of the first man of letters of the day, but it had, or was taken to have, a certain political significance. “The time was come,” says Johnson, “when those who affected to think liberty in danger affected likewise to think that a stage-play might preserve it.” Addison, after exhibiting more than the usual display of reluctance, prepared his play for representation, and it was undoubtedly taken to be in some sense a Whig manifesto. It was therefore remarkable that he should have applied to Pope for a prologue, though Pope’s connexions were entirely of the anti-Whiggish kind, and a passage in Windsor Forest, his last new poem (it appeared in March 1713), indicated
pretty plainly a refusal to accept the Whig shibboleths. In the Forest he was enthusiastic for the peace, and sneered at the Revolution. Pope afterwards declared that Addison had disavowed all party intentions at the time, and he accused him of insincerity for afterwards taking credit (in a poetical dedication of Cato) for the services rendered by his play to the cause of liberty. Pope’s assertion is worthless in any case where he could exalt his own character for consistency at another man’s expense, but it is true that both parties were inclined to equivocate. It is, indeed, difficult to understand how, if any “stage-play could preserve liberty,” such a play as Cato should do the work. The polished declamation is made up of the platitudes common to Whigs and Tories; and Bolingbroke gave the one to his own party when he presented fifty guineas to Cato’s representative for defending the cause of liberty so well against a perpetual dictator. The Whigs, said Pope, design a second present when they can contrive as good a saying. Bolingbroke was, of course, aiming at Marlborough, and his interpretation was intrinsically as plausible as any that could have been devised by his antagonists. Each side could adopt Cato as easily as rival sects can quote the Bible; and it seems possible that Addison may have suggested to Pope that nothing in Cato could really offend his principles. Addison, as Pope also tells us, thought the prologue ambiguous, and altered “Britons, arise!” to “Britons, attend!” lest the phrase should be thought to hint at a new revolution. Addison advised Pope about this time not to be content with the applause of “half the nation,” and perhaps regarded him as one who, by the fact of his external position with regard to parties, would be a more appropriate sponsor for the play.

  Whatever the intrinsic significance of Cato, circumstances gave it a political colour; and Pope, in a lively description of the first triumphant night to his friend Caryll, says, that as author of the successful and very spirited prologue, he was clapped into a Whig, sorely against his will, at every two lines. Shortly before he had spoken in the warmest terms to the same correspondent of the admirable moral tendency of the work; and perhaps he had not realized the full party significance till he became conscious of the impression produced upon the audience. Not long afterwards (letter of June 12, 1713), we find him complaining that his connexion with Steele and the Guardian was giving offence to some honest Jacobites. Had they known the nature of the connexion, they need hardly have grudged Steele his contributor. His next proceedings possibly suggested the piece of advice which Addison gave to Lady M. W. Montagu: “Leave Pope as soon as you can; he will certainly play you some devilish trick else.”