Chapter 10

If, therefore, Pope gains something in clearness and brilliancy by the comparative simplicity of his art, he loses by the extreme obviousness of its results. We cannot give him credit for being really moved by such platitudes. We have the same feeling as when a modern preacher employs twenty minutes in proving that it is wrong to worship idols of wood and stone. But, unfortunately, there is a reason more peculiar to Pope which damps our sympathy still more decidedly. Recent investigations have strengthened those suspicions of his honesty which were common even amongst his contemporaries. Mr. Elwin was (very excusably) disgusted by the revelations of his hero's baseness, till his indignation became a painful burden to himself and his readers. Speaking bluntly, indeed, we admit that lying is a vice, and that Pope was in a small way one of the most consummate liars that ever lived. He speaks himself of 'equivocating pretty genteelly' in regard to one of his peccadilloes. Pope's equivocation is to the equivocation of ordinary men what a tropical fern is to the stunted representatives of the same species in England. It grows until the fowls of the air can rest on its branches. His mendacity in short amounts to a monomania. That a man with intensely irritable nerves, and so fragile in constitution that his life might, without exaggeration, be called a 'long disease,' should defend himself by the natural weapons of the weak, equivocation and subterfuge, when exposed to the brutal horseplay common in that day, is indeed not surprising. But Pope's delight in artifice was something unparalleled. He could hardly drink tea without 'a stratagem,' or, as Lady Bolingbroke put it, was a politician about cabbages and turnips; and certainly he did not despise the arts known to politicians on a larger stage. Never, surely, did all the arts of the most skilful diplomacy give rise to a series of intrigues more complex than those which attended the publication of the 'P. T. Letters.' An ordinary man says that he is obliged to publish by request of friends, and we regard the transparent device as, at most, a venial offence. But in Pope's hands this simple trick becomes a complex apparatus of plots within plots, which have only been unravelled by the persevering labours of most industrious literary detectives. The whole story was given for the first time at full length in Mr. Elwin's edition of Pope, and the revelation borders upon the incredible. How Pope became for a time two men; how in one character he worked upon the wretched Curll through mysterious emissaries until the piratical bookseller undertook to publish the letters already privately printed by Pope himself; how Pope in his other character protested vehemently against the publication and disavowed all complicity in the preparations; how he set the House of Lords in motion to suppress the edition; and how, meanwhile, he took ingenious precautions to frustrate the interference which he provoked; how in the course of these manoeuvres his genteel equivocation swelled into lying on the most stupendous scale--all this story, with its various ins and outs, may be now read by those who have the patience. The problem may be suggested to casuists how far the iniquity of a lie should be measured by its immediate purpose, or how far it is aggravated by the enormous mass of superincumbent falsehoods which it inevitably brings in its train. We cannot condemn very seriously the affected coyness which tries to conceal a desire for publication under an apparent yielding to extortion; but we must certainly admit that the stomach of any other human being of whom a record has been preserved would have revolted at the thought of wading through such a waste of falsification to secure so paltry an end. Moreover, this is only one instance, and by no means the worst instance, of Pope's regular practice in such matters. Almost every publication of his life was attended with some sort of mystification passing into downright falsehood, and, at times, injurious to the character of his dearest friends. We have to add to this all the cases in which Pope attacked his enemies under feigned names and then disavowed his attacks; the malicious misstatements which he tried to propagate in regard to Addison; and we feel it a positive relief when we are able to acquit him, partially at least, of the worst charge of extorting 1,000_l._ from the Duchess of Marlborough for the suppression of a satirical passage.

Whatever minor pleas may be put forward in extenuation, it certainly cannot be denied that Pope's practical morality was defective. Genteel equivocation is not one of the Christian graces; and a gentleman convicted at the present day of practices comparable to those in which Pope indulged so freely might find it expedient to take his name off the books of any respectable club. Now, if we take literally Mr. Ruskin's doctrine that a noble morality must proceed from a noble nature, the inference from Pope's life to his writings is not satisfactory.

We may, indeed, take it for demonstrated that Pope was not one of those men who can be seen from all points of view. There are corners of his nature which will not bear examination. We cannot compare him with such men as Milton, or Cowper, or Wordsworth, whose lives are the noblest commentary on their works. Rather he is one of the numerous class in whom the excessive sensibility of genius has generated very serious disease. In more modern days we may fancy that his views would have taken a different turn, and that Pope would have belonged to the Satanic school of writers, and instead of lying enormously, have found relief for his irritated nerves in reviling all that is praised by ordinary mankind. But we must hesitate before passing from his acknowledged vices to a summary condemnation of the whole man. Human nature (the remark is not strictly original) is often inconsistent; and, side by side with degrading tendencies, there sometimes lie not only keen powers of intellect, but a genuine love for goodness, benevolence, and even for honesty. Pope is one of those strangely mixed characters which can only be fully delineated by a masterly hand, and Mr. Courthope in the life which concludes the definitive edition of the works has at last performed the task with admirable skill and without too much shrouding his hero's weaknesses. Meanwhile our pleasure in reading him is much counterbalanced by the suspicion that those pointed aphorisms which he turns out in so admirably polished a form may come only from the lips outwards. Pope, it must be remembered, is essentially a parasitical writer. He was a systematic appropriator--I do not say plagiarist, for the practice seems to be generally commendable--of other men's thoughts. His brilliant gems have often been found in some obscure writer, and have become valuable by the patient care with which he has polished and mounted them. We doubt their perfect sincerity because, when he is speaking in his own person, we can often prove him to be at best under a curious delusion. Take, for example, the 'Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,' which is his most perfect work. Some of the boasts in it are apparently quite justified by the facts. But what are we to say to such a passage as this?--

I was not born for courts or great affairs; I pay my debts, believe, and say my prayers; Can sleep without a poem in my head, Nor know if Dennis be alive or dead.

Admitting his independence, and not inquiring too closely into his prayers, can we forget that the gentleman who could sleep without a poem in his head called up a servant four times in one night of 'the dreadful winter of Forty' to supply him with paper, lest he should lose a thought? Or what is the value of a professed indifference to Dennis from the man distinguished beyond all other writers for the bitterness of his resentment against all small critics; who disfigured his best poems by his petty vengeance for old attacks; and who could not refrain from sneering at poor Dennis, even in the Prologue which he condescended to write for the benefit of his dying antagonist? Or, again, one can hardly help smiling at his praises of his own hospitality. The dinner which he promises to his friend is to conclude with--

Cheerful healths (your mistress shall have place), And, what's more rare, a poet shall say grace.

The provision made for the 'cheerful healths,' as Johnson lets us know, consisted of the remnant of a pint of wine, from which Pope had taken a couple of glasses, divided amongst two guests. There was evidently no danger of excessive conviviality. And then a grace in which Bolingbroke joined could not have been a very impressive ceremony.

Thus, we are always pursued, in reading Pope, by disagreeable misgivings. We don't know what comes from the heart, and what from the lips: when the real man is speaking, and when we are only listening to old commonplaces skilfully vamped. There is always, if we please, a bad interpretation to be placed upon his finest sentiments. His indignation against the vicious is confused with his hatred of personal enemies; he protests most loudly that he is honest when he is 'equivocating most genteelly;' his independence may be called selfishness or avarice; his toleration simple indifference; and even his affection for his friends a decorous fiction, which will never lead him to the slightest sacrifice of his own vanity or comfort. A critic of the highest order is provided with an Ithuriel spear, which discriminates the sham sentiments from the true. As a banker's clerk can tell a bad coin by its ring on the counter, without need of a testing apparatus, the true critic can instinctively estimate the amount of bullion in Pope's epigrammatic tinsel. But criticism of this kind, as Pope truly says, is as rare as poetical genius. Humbler writers must be content to take their weights and measures, or, in other words, to test their first impressions, by such external evidence as is available. They must proceed cautiously in these delicate matters, and instead of leaping to the truth by a rapid intuition, patiently enquire what light is thrown upon Pope's sincerity by the recorded events of his life, and a careful cross-examination of the various witnesses to his character. They must, indeed, keep in mind Mr. Ruskin's excellent canon--that good fruit, even in moralising, can only be borne by a good tree. Where Pope has succeeded in casting into enduring form some valuable moral sentiment, we may therefore give him credit for having at least felt it sincerely. If he did not always act upon it, the weakness is not peculiar to Pope. Time, indeed, has partly done the work for us. In Pope, more than in almost any other writer, the grain has sifted itself from the chaff. The jewels have remained after the flimsy embroidery in which they were fixed has fallen into decay. Such a result was natural from his mode of composition. He caught at some inspiration of the moment; he cast it roughly into form; brooded over it; retouched it again and again; and when he had brought it to the very highest polish of which his art was capable, placed it in a pigeon-hole to be fitted, when the opportunity offered, into an appropriate corner of his mosaic-work. We can see him at work, for example, in the passage about Addison and the celebrated concluding couplet. The epigrams in which his poetry abounds have obviously been composed in the same fashion, for that 'masterpiece of man,' as South is made to call it in the 'Dunciad,' is only produced in perfection when the labour which would have made an ode has been concentrated upon a couple of lines. There is a celebrated recipe for dressing a lark, if we remember rightly, in which the lark is placed inside a snipe, and the snipe in a woodcock, and so on till you come to a turkey, or, if procurable, to an ostrich; then, the mass having been properly stewed, the superincumbent envelopes are all thrown away, and the essences of the whole are supposed to be embodied in the original nucleus. So the perfect epigram, at which Pope is constantly aiming, should be the quintessence of a whole volume of reflection. Such literary cookery, however, implies not only labour, but an unwearied vividness of thought and feeling. The poet must put his soul into the work as well as his artistic power. Thus, if we may take Pope's most vigorous expressions as an indication of his strongest convictions, and check their conclusions by his personal history and by the general tendency of his writings, we might succeed in putting together something like a satisfactory statement of the moral system which he expressed forcibly because he believed in it sincerely.

Without following the proofs in detail, let us endeavour to give some statement of the result. What, in fact, did Pope learn by his study of man, such as it was? What does he tell us about the character of human beings and their position in the universe which is either original or marked by the freshness of independent thought? Perhaps the most characteristic vein of reflection is that which is embodied in the 'Dunciad.' There, at least, we have Pope speaking energetically and sincerely. He really detests, abjures, and abominates as impious and heretical, without a trace of mental reservation, the worship of the great goddess Dulness. The 'Dunciad' does not show the quality in which Pope most excels, that which makes his best satires resemble the quintessence of the most brilliant thought of his most brilliant contemporaries. But it has more energy and continuity than most of his other poetry. The 'Dunciad' often flows in a continuous stream of eloquence, instead of dribbling out in little jets of epigram. If there are fewer points, there are more frequent gushes of sustained rhetoric. Even when Pope condescends--and he condescends much too often--to pelt his antagonists with mere filth, he does it with a touch of boisterous vigour. He laughs out. He catches something from his patron Swift when he

Laughs and shakes in Rabelais's easy chair.

His lungs seem to be fuller and his voice to lose for the time its tricks of mincing affectation. Here, indeed, there can be no question of insincerity. Pope's scorn of folly is to be condemned only so far as it was connected with too bitter a hatred of fools. He has suffered, as Swift foretold, by the insignificance of the enemies against whom he rages with superfluous vehemence. But for Pope, no one in this generation would have heard of Arnall and Moore and Breval and Bezaleel Morris and fifty more ephemeral denizens of Grub Street. The fault is, indeed, inherent in the plan. It is in some degree creditable to Pope that his satire was on the whole justified, so far as it could be justified, by the correctness of his judgment. The only great man whom he has seriously assaulted is Bentley; and to Pope, Bentley was of necessity not the greatest of classical critics, but the tasteless mutilator of Milton, and, as we must perhaps add, the object of the hatred of Pope's particular friends, Atterbury and Warburton. The misfortune is that the more just his satire, the more perishable is its interest; and if we regard the 'Dunciad' simply as an assault upon the vermin who then infested literature, we must consider him as a man who should use a steam-hammer to crack a flea. Unluckily for ourselves, however, it cannot be admitted so easily that Curll and Dennis and the rest had a merely temporary interest. Regarded as types of literary nuisances--and Pope does not condescend in his poetry, though the want is partly supplied in the notes, to indulge in much personal detail--they may be said by cynics to have a more enduring vitality. Of course there is at the present day no such bookseller as Curll, living by piratical invasions of established rights, and pandering to the worst passions of ignorant readers; no writer who could be fitly called, like Concanen,

A cold, long-winded native of the deep,

and fitly sentenced to dive where Fleet Ditch

Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames;

and most certainly we must deny the present applicability of the note upon 'Magazines' compiled by Pope, or rather by Warburton, for the episcopal bludgeon is perceptible in the prose description. They are not at present 'the eruption of every miserable scribbler, the scum of every dirty newspaper, or fragments of fragments picked up from every dirty dunghill ... equally the disgrace of human wit, morality, decency, and common sense.' But if the translator of the 'Dunciad' into modern phraseology would have some difficulty in finding a head for every cap, there are perhaps some satirical stings which have not quite lost their point. The legitimate drama, so theatrical critics tell us, has not quite shaken off the rivalry of sensational scenery and idiotic burlesque, though possibly we do not produce absurdities equal to that which, as Pope tells us, was actually introduced by Theobald, in which

Nile rises, Heaven descends, and dance on earth Gods, imps, and monsters, music, rage, and mirth, A fire, a jig, a battle and a ball, Till one wide conflagration swallows all.

There is still facetiousness which reminds us too forcibly that

Gentle Dulness ever loves a joke,

and even sermons, for which we may apologise on the ground that

Dulness is sacred in a sound divine.

Here and there, too, if we may trust certain stern reviewers, there are writers who have learnt the principle that

Index learning turns no student pale, Yet holds the eel of Science by the tail.

And the first four lines, at least, of the great prophecy at the conclusion of the third book is thought by the enemies of muscular Christianity to be possibly approaching its fulfilment:

Proceed, great days! till learning fly the shore, Till birch shall blush with noble blood no more, Till Thames see Eton's sons for ever play, Till Westminster's whole year be holiday, Till Isis' elders reel, their pupils sport, And Alma Mater lies dissolved in Port!

No! So far as we can see, it is still true that

Born a goddess, Dulness never dies.

Men, we know it on high authority, are still mostly fools. If Pope be in error, it is not so much that his adversary is beneath him, as that she is unassailable by wit or poetry. Weapons of the most ethereal temper spend their keenness in vain against the 'anarch old' whose power lies in utter insensibility. It is fighting with a mist, and firing cannon-balls into a mudheap. As well rave against the force of gravitation, or complain that our gross bodies must be nourished by solid food. If, however, we should be rather grateful than otherwise to a man who is sanguine enough to believe that satire can be successful against stupidity, and that Grub Street, if it cannot be exterminated, can at least be lashed into humility, we might perhaps complain that Pope has taken rather too limited a view of the subject. Dulness has other avatars besides the literary. In the last and finest book, Pope attempts to complete his plan by exhibiting the influence of dulness upon theology and science. The huge torpedo benumbs every faculty of the human mind, and paralyses all the Muses, except 'mad Mathesis,' which, indeed, does not carry on so internecine a war with the general enemy. The design is commendable, and executed, so far as Pope was on a level with his task, with infinite spirit. But, however excellent the poetry, the logic is defective, and the description of the evil inadequate. Pope has but a vague conception of the mode in which dulness might become the leading force in politics, lower religion till it became a mere cloak for selfishness, and make learning nothing but laborious and pedantic trifling. Had his powers been equal to his goodwill, we might have had a satire far more elevated than anything which he has attempted; for a man must be indeed a dull student of history who does not recognise the vast influence of dulness-worship on the whole period which has intervened between Pope and ourselves. Nay, it may be feared that it will yet be some time before education bills and societies for university extension will have begun to dissipate the evil. A modern satirist, were satire still alive, would find an ample occupation for his talents in a worthy filling out of Pope's incomplete sketch. But though I feel, I must endeavour to resist the temptation of indicating some of the probable objects of his antipathy.

Pope's gallant assault on the common enemy indicates, meanwhile, his characteristic attitude. Pope is the incarnation of the literary spirit. He is the most complete representative in our language of the intellectual instincts which find their natural expression in pure literature, as distinguished from literature applied to immediate practical ends, or enlisted in the service of philosophy or science. The complete antithesis to that spirit is the evil principle which Pope attacks as dulness. This false goddess is the literary Ahriman; and Pope's natural antipathies, exaggerated by his personal passions and weaknesses to extravagant proportions, express themselves fully in his great mock-epic. His theory may be expressed in a parody of Nelson's immortal advice to his midshipmen: 'Be an honest man and hate dulness as you do the devil.' Dulness generates the asphyxiating atmosphere in which no true literature can thrive. It oppresses the lungs and irritates the nerves of men whose keen brilliant intellects mark them as the natural servants of literature. Seen from this point of view, there is an honourable completeness in Pope's career. Possibly a modern subject of literature may, without paradox, express a certain gratitude to Pope for a virtue which he would certainly be glad to imitate. Pope was the first man who made an independence by literature. First and last, he seems to have received over 8,000_l._ for his translation of Homer, a sum then amply sufficient to enable him to live in comfort. No sum at all comparable to this was ever received by a poet or novelist until the era of Scott and Byron. Now, without challenging admiration for Pope on the simple ground that he made his fortune, it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this feat at the time. A contemporary who, whatever his faults, was a still more brilliant example than Pope of the purely literary qualities, suggests a curious parallel. Voltaire, as he tells us, was so weary of the humiliations that dishonour letters, that to stay his disgust he resolved to make 'what scoundrels call a great fortune.' Some of Voltaire's means of reaching this end appear to have been more questionable than Pope's. But both of these men of genius early secured their independence by raising themselves permanently above the need of writing for money. It may be added in passing that there is a curious similarity in intellect and character between Pope and Voltaire which would on occasion be worth fuller exposition. The use, too, which Pope made of his fortune was thoroughly honourable. We scarcely give due credit, as a rule, to the man who has the rare merit of distinctly recognising his true vocation in life, and adhering to it with unflinching pertinacity. Probably the fact that such virtue generally brings a sufficient personal reward in this world seems to dispense with the necessity of additional praise. But call it a virtuous or merely a useful quality, we must at least admit that it is the necessary groundwork of a thoroughly satisfactory career. Pope, who from his infancy had

Lisped in numbers, for the numbers came,