Part 33

Blank verse, where the sentiment is trivial as here, merely removes prose to a proper ideal distance, where it is in keeping with more impassioned parts, but commonplace set to this rocking-horse jog irritates the nerves. There is nothing here to remind us of the older tragic style but the _exeunt_ at the close. Its pithy conciseness and the relief which it brings us from his majesty’s prosing give it an almost poetical savor. Aspatia’s reflections upon suicide (or “suppressing our breath,” as she calls it), in the same play, will make few readers regret that Shakespeare was left to his own unassisted barbarism when he wrote Hamlet’s soliloquy on the same topic:--

“’T was in compassion of our woe That nature first made poisons grow, For hopeless wretches such as I Kindly providing means to die: As mothers do their children keep, So Nature feeds and makes us sleep. The indisposed she does invite To go to bed before ’tis night.”

Correctness in this case is but a synonyme of monotony, and words are chosen for the number of their syllables, for their rubbishy value to fill-in, instead of being forced upon the poet by the meaning which occupies the mind. Language becomes useful for its diluting properties, rather than as the medium by means of which the thought or fancy precipitate themselves in crystals upon a connecting thread of purpose. Let us read a few verses from Beaumont and Fletcher, that we may feel fully the difference between the rude and the reformed styles. This also shall be a speech of Aspatia’s. Antiphila, one of her maidens, is working the story of Theseus and Ariadne in tapestry, for the older masters loved a picturesque background and knew the value of fanciful accessaries. Aspatia thinks the face of Ariadne not sad enough:--

“Do it by me, Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia, And you shall find all true but the wild island. Suppose I stand upon the seabeach now, Mine arms thus, and my hair blown with the wind, Wild as that desert; and let all about me Be teachers of my story. Do my face (If ever thou hadst feeling of a sorrow) Thus, thus, Antiphila; strive to make me look Like sorrow’s monument; and the trees about me Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks Groan with continual surges; and behind me Make all a desolation.”

What instinctive felicity of versification! what sobbing breaks and passionate repetitions are here!

We see what the direction of the new tendency was, but it would be an inadequate or a dishonest criticism that should hold Pope responsible for the narrow compass of the instrument which was his legacy from his immediate predecessors, any more than for the wearisome thrumming-over of his tune by those who came after him and who had caught his technical skill without his genius. The question properly stated is, How much was it possible to make of the material supplied by the age in which he lived? and how much did he make of it? Thus far, among the great English poets who preceded him, we have seen actual life represented by Chaucer, imaginative life by Spenser, ideal life by Shakespeare, the interior life by Milton. But as everything aspires to a rhythmical utterance of itself, so conventional life, itself a new phenomenon, was waiting for its poet. It found or made a most fitting one in Pope. He stands for exactness of intellectual expression, for perfect propriety of phrase (I speak of him at his best), and is a striking instance how much success and permanence of reputation depend on conscientious finish as well as on native endowment. Butler asks,--

“Then why should those who pick and choose The best of all the best compose, And join it by Mosaic art, In graceful order, part to part, To make the whole in beauty suit, Not merit as complete repute As those who, with less art and pain, Can do it with their native brain?”

Butler knew very well that precisely what stamps a man as an artist is this power of finding out what _is_ “the best of all the best.”

I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope with diffidence. I was brought up in the old superstition that he was the greatest poet that ever lived; and when I came to find that I had instincts of my own, and my mind was brought in contact with the apostles of a more esoteric doctrine of poetry, I felt that ardent desire for smashing the idols I had been brought up to worship, without any regard to their artistic beauty, which characterizes youthful zeal. What was it to me that Pope was called a master of style? I felt, as Addison says in his Freeholder when answering an argument in favor of the Pretender because he could speak English and George I. could not, “that I did not wish to be tyrannized over in the best English that ever was spoken.” The young demand thoughts that find an echo in their real and not their acquired nature, and care very little about the dress they are put in. It is later that we learn to like the conventional, as we do olives. There was a time when I could not read Pope, but disliked him on principle as old Roger Ascham seems to have felt about Italy when he says, “I was once in Italy myself, but I thank God my abode there was only nine days.”

But Pope fills a very important place in the history of English poetry, and must be studied by every one who would come to a clear knowledge of it. I have since read over every line that Pope ever wrote, and every letter written by or to him, and that more than once. If I have not come to the conclusion that he is the greatest of poets, I believe that I am at least in a condition to allow him every merit that is fairly his. I have said that Pope as a literary man represents precision and grace of expression; but as a poet he represents something more,--nothing less, namely, than one of those eternal controversies of taste which will last as long as the imagination and understanding divide men between them. It is not a matter to be settled by any amount of argument or demonstration. There are born Popists or Wordsworthians, Lockists or Kantists, and there is nothing more to be said of the matter.

Wordsworth was not in a condition to do Pope justice. A man brought up in sublime mountain solitudes, and whose nature was a solitude more vast than they, walking an earth which quivered with the throe of the French Revolution, the child of an era of profound mental and moral movement, it could not be expected that he should be in sympathy with the poet of artificial life. Moreover, he was the apostle of imagination, and came at a time when the school which Pope founded had degenerated into a mob of mannerists who wrote with ease, and who with their congenial critics united at once to decry poetry which brought in the dangerous innovation of having a soul in it.

But however it may be with poets, it is very certain that a reader is happiest whose mind is broad enough to enjoy the natural school for its nature, and the artificial for its artificiality, provided they be only good of their kind. At any rate, we must allow that the man who can produce one perfect work is either a great genius or a very lucky one; and so far as we who read are concerned, it is of secondary importance which. And Pope has done this in the “Rape of the Lock.” For wit, fancy, invention, and keeping, it has never been surpassed. I do not say there is in it poetry of the highest order, or that Pope is a poet whom any one would choose as the companion of his best hours. There is no inspiration in it, no trumpet-call, but for pure entertainment it is unmatched. There are two kinds of genius. The first and highest may be said to speak out of the eternal to the present, and must compel its age to understand _it_; the second understands its age, and tells it what it wishes to be told. Let us find strength and inspiration in the one, amusement and instruction in the other, and be honestly thankful for both.

The very earliest of Pope’s productions give indications of that sense and discretion, as well as wit, which afterward so eminently distinguished him. The facility of expression is remarkable, and we find also that perfect balance of metre, which he afterward carried so far as to be wearisome. His pastorals were written in his sixteenth year, and their publication immediately brought him into notice. The following four verses from his first pastoral are quite characteristic in their antithetic balance:--

“You that, too wise for pride, too good for power, Enjoy the glory to be great no more, And carrying with you all the world can boast, To all the world illustriously are lost!”

The sentiment is affected, and reminds one of that future period of Pope’s Correspondence with his Friends, when Swift, his heart corroding with disappointed ambition at Dublin, Bolingbroke raising delusive turnips at his farm, and Pope pretending not to feel the lampoons which imbittered his life, played together the solemn farce of affecting indifference to the world by which it would have agonized them to be forgotten, and wrote letters addressed to each other, but really intended for that posterity whose opinion they assumed to despise.

In these pastorals there is an entire want of nature. For example in that on the death of Mrs. Tempest:--

“Her fate is whispered by the gentle breeze And told in sighs to all the trembling trees; The trembling trees, in every plain and wood, Her fate remurmur to the silver flood: The silver flood, so lately calm, appears Swelled with new passion, and o’erflows with tears; The winds and trees and floods her death deplore Daphne, our grief! our glory now no more!”

All this is as perfectly professional as the mourning of an undertaker. Still worse, Pope materializes and makes too palpably objective that sympathy which our grief forces upon outward nature. Milton, before making the echoes mourn for Lycidas, puts our feelings in tune, as it were, and hints at his own imagination as the source of this emotion in inanimate things,--

“But, O the heavy change now thou art gone!”

In “Windsor Forest” we find the same thing again:--

“Here his first lays majestic Denham sung, There the last numbers flowed from Cowley’s tongue; O early lost, what tears the river shed When the sad pomp along his banks was led! His drooping swans on every note expire, And on his willows hung each muse’s lyre!”

In the same poem he indulges the absurd conceit that,

“Beasts urged by us, their fellow-beasts pursue, And learn of man each other to undo”;

and in the succeeding verses gives some striking instances of that artificial diction, so inappropriate to poems descriptive of natural objects and ordinary life, which brought verse-making to such a depth of absurdity in the course of the century.

“With slaughtering guns, the unwearied fowler roves Where frosts have whitened all the naked groves; Where doves in flocks the leafless trees o’ershade, And lonely woodcocks haunt the watery glade; He lifts the tube and levels with his eye, Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky: Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath, The clamorous lapwings feel the leaden death; Oft as the mounting larks their notes prepare, They fall and leave their little lives in air.”

Now one would imagine that the _tube_ of the fowler was a telescope instead of a gun. And think of the larks preparing their notes like a country choir! Yet even here there are admirable lines,--

“Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath,”

* * * * *

“They fall and leave their little lives in air,”

for example.

In Pope’s next poem, the “Essay on Criticism,” the wit and poet become apparent. It is full of clear thoughts, compactly expressed. In this poem, written when Pope was only twenty-one, occur some of those lines which have become proverbial; such as

“A little learning is a dangerous thing”;

“For fools rush in where angels fear to tread”;

“True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”

“For each ill author is as bad a friend.”

In all of these we notice that terseness in which (regard being had to his especial range of thought) Pope has never been equalled. One cannot help being struck also with the singular _discretion_ which the poem gives evidence of. I do not know where to look for another author in whom it appeared so early, and, considering the vivacity of his mind and the constantly besetting temptation of his wit, it is still more wonderful. In his boyish correspondence with poor old Wycherley, one would suppose him to be the man and Wycherley the youth. Pope’s understanding was no less vigorous (when not the dupe of his nerves) than his fancy was lightsome and sprightly.

I come now to what in itself would be enough to have immortalized him as a poet, the “Rape of the Lock,” in which, indeed, he appears more purely as poet than in any other of his productions. Elsewhere he has shown more force, more wit, more reach of thought, but nowhere such a truly artistic combination of elegance and fancy. His genius has here found its true direction, and the very same artificiality, which in his pastorals was unpleasing, heightens the effect, and adds to the general keeping. As truly as Shakespeare is the poet of man, as God made him, dealing with great passions and innate motives, so truly is Pope the poet of society, the delineator of manners, the exposer of those motives which may be called _acquired_, whose spring is in institutions and habits of purely worldly origin.

The “Rape of the Lock” was written in Pope’s twenty-fourth year, and the machinery of the Sylphs was added at the suggestion of Dr. Garth,--a circumstance for which we can feel a more unmixed gratitude to him than for writing the “Dispensary.” The idea was taken from that entertaining book “The Count de Gabalis,” in which Fouquè afterward found the hint for his “Undine”; but the little sprites as they appear in the poem are purely the creation of Pope’s fancy.

The theory of the poem is excellent. The heroic is out of the question in fine society. It is perfectly true that almost every door we pass in the street closes upon its private tragedy, but the moment a _great_ passion enters a man he passes at once out of the artificial into the human. So long as he continues artificial, the sublime is a conscious absurdity to him. The mock-heroic then is the only way in which the petty actions and sufferings of the fine world can be epically treated, and the contrast continually suggested with subjects of larger scope and more dignified treatment, makes no small part of the pleasure and sharpens the point of the wit. The invocation is admirable:--

“Say, what strange motive, Goddess, could compel, A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle? O say what stranger cause, yet unexplored, Could make a gentle belle reject a lord?”

The keynote of the poem is here struck, and we are able to put ourselves in tune with it. It is not a parody of the heroic style, but only a setting it in satirical juxtaposition with cares and events and modes of thought with which it is in comical antipathy, and while _it_ is not degraded, _they_ are shown in their triviality. The “clouded cane,” as compared with the Homeric spear, indicates the difference of scale, the lower plane of emotions and passions. The opening of the action, too, is equally good:--

“Sol through white curtains shot a timorous ray, And oped those eyes that must eclipse the day, Now lapdogs give themselves the rousing shake, And sleepless lovers just at twelve awake; Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knocked the ground, And the pressed watch returned a silver sound.”

The mythology of the Sylphs is full of the most fanciful wit; indeed, wit infused with fancy is Pope’s peculiar merit. The Sylph is addressing Belinda:--

“Know, then, unnumbered spirits round thee fly, The light militia of the lower sky; These, though unseen, are ever on the wing, Hang o’er the box and hover round the ring. As now your own our beings were of old, And once enclosed in woman’s beauteous mould; Think not, when woman’s transient breath is fled, That all her vanities at once are dead; Succeeding vanities she still regards, And, though she plays no more, o’erlooks the cards. For when the fair in all their pride expire, To their first elements their souls retire; The sprites of fiery termagants in flame Mount up and take a salamander’s name; Soft yielding nymphs to water glide away And sip, with nymphs, their elemental tea; The graver prude sinks downward to a gnome, In search of mischief still on earth to roam; The light coquettes in sylphs aloft repair And sport and flutter in the fields of air.”

And the contrivance by which Belinda is awakened is also perfectly in keeping with all the rest of the machinery:--

“He said: when Shock, who thought she slept too long, Leaped up and waked his mistress with his tongue; ’Twas then, Belinda, if report say true, Thy eyes first opened on a _billet-doux_.”

Throughout this poem the satiric wit of Pope peeps out in the pleasantest little smiling ways, as where, in describing the toilet-table, he says:--

“Here files of pins extend their shining rows, Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, _billet-doux_.”

Or when, after the fatal lock has been severed,

“Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes, And screams of horror rend the affrighted skies, Not louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast When husbands or when lapdogs breathe their last Or when rich china-vessels, fallen from high, In glittering dust and painted fragments lie!”

And so, when the conflict begins:--

“Now Jove suspends his golden scales in air; Weighs the men’s wits against the ladies’ hair; The doubtful beam long nods from side to side; At length the wits mount up, the hairs subside.”

But more than the wit and fancy, I think, the perfect keeping of the poem deserves admiration. Except a touch of grossness, here and there, there is the most pleasing harmony in all the conceptions and images. The punishments which he assigns to the sylphs who neglect their duty are charmingly appropriate and ingenious:--

“Whatever spirit, careless of his charge, His post neglects, or leaves the fair at large, Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o’ertake his sins; Be stopped in vials or transfixed with pins, Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie, Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin’s eye; Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain, While clogged he beats his silver wings in vain; Or alum styptics with contracting power, Shrink his thin essence like a rivelled flower; Or as Ixion fixed the wretch shall feel The giddy motion of the whirling wheel, In fumes of burning chocolate, shall glow, And tremble at the sea that froths below!”

The speech of Thalestris, too, with its droll climax, is equally good:--

“Methinks already I your tears survey, Already hear the horrid things they say, Already see you a degraded toast, And all your honor in a whisper lost! How shall I then your helpless fame defend? ’Twill then be infamy to seem your friend! And shall this prize, the inestimable prize, Exposed through crystal to the gazing eyes, And heightened by the diamond’s circling rays, On that rapacious hand forever blaze? Sooner shall grass in Hydepark Circus grow, And wits take lodging in the sound of Bow, Sooner let earth, air, sea, in chaos fall, Men, monkeys, lapdogs, parrots, perish all!”

So also Belinda’s account of the morning omens:--

“’Twas this the morning omens seemed to tell; Thrice from my trembling hand the patch-box fell; The tottering china shook without a wind; Nay, Poll sat mute, and Shock was most unkind.”

The idea of the goddess of Spleen, and of her palace, where

“The dreaded East is all the wind that blows,”

was a very happy one. In short, the whole poem more truly deserves the name of a creation than anything Pope ever wrote. The action is confined to a world of his own, the supernatural agency is wholly of his own contrivance, and nothing is allowed to overstep the limitations of the subject. It ranks by itself as one of the purest works of human fancy; whether that fancy be strictly poetical or not is another matter. If we compare it with the “Midsummer-night’s Dream,” an uncomfortable doubt is suggested. The perfection of form in the “Rape of the Lock” is to me conclusive evidence that in it the natural genius of Pope found fuller and freer expression than in any other of his poems. The others are aggregates of brilliant passages rather than harmonious wholes.

It is a droll illustration of the inconsistencies of human nature, a more profound satire than Pope himself ever wrote, that his fame should chiefly rest upon the “Essay on Man.” It has been praised and admired by men of the most opposite beliefs, and men of no belief at all. Bishops and free-thinkers have met here on a common ground of sympathetic approval. And, indeed, there is no particular faith in it. It is a droll medley of inconsistent opinions. It proves only two things beyond a question,--that Pope was not a great thinker; and that wherever he found a thought, no matter what, he could express it so tersely, so clearly, and with such smoothness of versification as to give it an everlasting currency. Hobbes’s unwieldy Leviathan, left stranded there on the shore of the last age, and nauseous with the stench of its selfishness,--from this Pope distilled a fragrant oil with which to fill the brilliant lamps of his philosophy,--lamps like those in the tombs of alchemists, that go out the moment the healthy air is let in upon them. The only positive doctrines in the poem are the selfishness of Hobbes set to music, and the Pantheism of Spinoza brought down from mysticism to commonplace. Nothing can be more absurd than many of the dogmas taught in this “Essay on Man.” For example, Pope affirms explicitly that instinct is something better than reason:--

“See him from Nature rising slow to art, To copy instinct then was reason’s part; Thus, then, to man the voice of nature spake;-- Go, from the creatures thy instructions take; Learn from the beasts what food the thickets yield; Learn from the birds the physic of the field; The arts of building from the bee receive; Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave; Learn of the little nautilus to sail, Spread the thin oar, or catch the driving gale.”

I say nothing of the quiet way in which the general term “nature” is substituted for God, but how unutterably void of reasonableness is the theory that Nature would have left her highest product, man, destitute of that instinct with which she had endowed her other creatures! As if reason were not the most sublimated form of instinct. The accuracy on which Pope prided himself, and for which he is commended, was not accuracy of thought so much as of expression. And he cannot always even claim this merit, but only that of correct rhyme, as in one of the passages I have already quoted from the “Rape of the Lock” he talks of _casting_ shrieks to heaven,--a performance of some difficulty, except when _cast_ is needed to rhyme with _last_.