Part 34

But the supposition is that in the “Essay on Man” Pope did not himself know what he was writing. He was only the condenser and epigrammatizer of Bolingbroke,--a very fitting St. John for such a gospel. Or, if he _did_ know, we can account for the contradictions by supposing that he threw in some of the commonplace moralities to conceal his real drift. Johnson asserts that Bolingbroke in private laughed at Pope’s having been made the mouthpiece of opinions which he did not hold. But this is hardly probable when we consider the relations between them. It is giving Pope altogether too little credit for intelligence to suppose that he did not understand the principles of his intimate friend. The caution with which he at first concealed the authorship would argue that he had doubts as to the reception of the poem. When it was attacked on the score of infidelity, he gladly accepted Warburton’s championship, and assumed whatever pious interpretation he contrived to thrust upon it. The beginning of the poem is familiar to everybody:--

“Awake, my St. John, leave all meaner things To low ambition and the pride of kings; Let us (since life can little more supply Than just to look about us and to die) Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man, A mighty maze,--but not without a plan”;

To expatiate _o’er_ a mighty maze is rather loose writing but the last verse, as it stood in the original editions, was,

“A mighty maze of walks without a plan”;

and perhaps this came nearer Pope’s real opinion than the verse he substituted for it. Warburton is careful not to mention _this_ variation in his notes. The poem is everywhere as remarkable for its confusion of logic as it often is for ease of verse and grace of expression. An instance of both occurs in a passage frequently quoted:--

“Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate; All but the page prescribed, their present state; From brutes what men, from men what spirits know, Or who would suffer being here below? The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food, And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood. O, blindness to the future kindly given That each may fill the circle meant by heaven! Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish or a sparrow fall, Atoms or systems into ruin hurled, And now a bubble burst, and now a world!”

Now, if “heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate,” why should not the lamb “skip and play,” if he had the reason of man? Why, because he would then be able to read the book of fate. But if man himself cannot, why, then, could the lamb with the reason of man? For, if the lamb had the reason of man, the book of fate would still be hidden, so far as himself was concerned. If the inferences we can draw from appearances are equivalent to a knowledge of destiny, the knowing enough to take an umbrella in cloudy weather might be called so. There is a manifest confusion between what we know about ourselves and about other people; the whole point of the passage being that we are always mercifully blinded to _our own_ future, however much reason we may possess. There is also inaccuracy as well as inelegance in saying,

“Heaven, _Who_ sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish or a sparrow fall.”

To the last verse Warburton, desirous of reconciling his author with Scripture, appends a note referring to Matthew x. 29: “Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing? and one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father.” It would not have been safe to have referred to the thirty-first verse: “Fear ye not, therefore, _ye are of more value_ than many sparrows.”

To my feeling, one of the most beautiful passages in the whole poem is that familiar one:--

“Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored mind Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind, His soul proud science never taught to stray Far as the solar walk or milky way: Yet simple Nature to his hope has given Behind the cloud-topt hill a humbler heaven; Some safer world in depth of woods embraced, Some happier island in the watery waste, Where slaves once more their native land behold, No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. To _be_ contents his natural desire, He asks no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire, But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company.”

But this comes in as a corollary to what went just before:--

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast, Man never is but always to be blest; The soul, uneasy, and confined from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”

Then follows immediately the passage about the poor Indian, who, after all, it seems, is contented with merely _being_, and whose soul, therefore, is an exception to the general rule. And what have the “solar walk” (as he calls it) and “milky way” to do with the affair? Does our hope of heaven depend on our knowledge of astronomy? Or does he mean that science and faith are necessarily hostile? And, after being told that it is the “untutored mind” of the savage which “sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind,” we are rather surprised to find that the lesson the poet intends to teach is that

“All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul. That, changed through all, and yet in all the same, Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame, Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees.”

So that we are no better off than the untutored Indian, after the poet has tutored us. Dr. Warburton makes a rather lame attempt to ward off the charge of Spinozism from this last passage. He would have found it harder to show that the acknowledgment of any divine revelation would not overturn the greater part of its teachings. If Pope intended by his poem all that the bishop takes for granted in his commentary, we must deny him what is usually claimed as his first merit,--clearness. If he did _not_, we grant him clearness as a writer at the expense of sincerity as a man. Perhaps a more charitable solution of the difficulty would be, that Pope’s precision of thought was no match for the fluency of his verse.

Lord Byron goes so far as to say, in speaking of Pope, that he who executes the best, no matter what his department, will rank the highest. I think there are enough indications in these letters of Byron’s, however, that they were written rather more against Wordsworth than for Pope. The rule he lays down would make Voltaire a greater poet, in some respects, than Shakespeare. Byron cites Petrarch as an example; yet if Petrarch had put nothing more into his sonnets than _execution_, there are plenty of Italian sonneteers who would be his match. But, in point of fact, the department chooses the man and not the man the department, and it has a great deal to do with our estimate of him. Is the department of Milton no higher than that of Butler? Byron took especial care not to write in the style he commended. But I think Pope has received quite as much credit in respect even of execution as he deserves. Surely execution is not confined to versification alone. What can be worse than this?

“At length Erasmus, that great, injured name, (The glory of the priesthood and the shame,) Stemmed the wild torrent of a barbarous age, And drove those holy vandals off the stage.”

It would have been hard for Pope to have found a prettier piece of confusion in any of the small authors he laughed at than this image of a great, injured name stemming a torrent and driving vandals off the stage. And in the following verses the image is helplessly confused:--

“Kind self-conceit to some her glass applies, Which no one looks in with another’s eyes, But, as the flatterer or dependant paint, Beholds himself a patriot, chief, or saint.”

The use of the word “applies” is perfectly un-English; and it seems that people who look in this remarkable glass see their pictures and not their reflections. Often, also, when Pope attempts the sublime, his epithets become curiously unpoetical, as where he says, in the Dunciad,

“As, one by one, at dread Medea’s strain, The sickening stars fade off _the ethereal plain_.”

And not seldom he is satisfied with the music of the verse without much regard to fitness of imagery; in the “Essay on Man,” for example:--

“Passions, like elements, though born to fight, Yet, mixed and softened, in his work unite; These ’tis enough to temper and employ; But what composes man can man destroy? Suffice that Reason keep to Nature’s road, Subject, compound them, follow her and God. Love, Hope, and Joy, fair Pleasure’s smiling train, Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of Pain, These, mixed with Art, and to due bounds confined, Make and maintain the balance of the mind.”

Here reason is represented as an apothecary compounding pills of “pleasure’s smiling train” and the “family of pain.” And in the Moral Essays,

“Know God and Nature only are the same; In man the judgment shoots at flying game, A bird of passage, gone as soon as found, Now in the moon, perhaps, now under ground.”

The “judgment shooting at flying game” is an odd image enough; but I think a bird of passage, now in the moon and now under ground, could be found nowhere--out of Goldsmith’s Natural History, perhaps. An epigrammatic expression will also tempt him into saying something without basis in truth, as where he ranks together “Macedonia’s madman and the Swede,” and says that neither of them “looked forward farther than his nose,” a slang phrase which may apply well enough to Charles XII., but certainly not to the pupil of Aristotle, who showed himself capable of a large political forethought. So, too, the rhyme, if correct, is a sufficient apology for want of propriety in phrase, as where he makes “Socrates _bleed_.”

But it is in his Moral Essays and parts of his Satires that Pope deserves the praise which he himself desired:--

“Happily to steer From grave to gay, from lively to severe, Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease, Intent to reason, or polite to please.”

Here Pope must be allowed to have established a style of his own, in which he is without a rival. One can open upon wit and epigram at any page.

“Behold, if Fortune or a mistress frowns, Some plunge in business, other shave their crowns; To ease the soul of one oppressive weight, This quits an empire, that embroils a state; The same adust complexion has impelled, Charles to the convent, Philip to the field.”

Indeed, I think one gets a little tired of the invariable _this_ set off by the inevitable _that_, and wishes antithesis would let him have a little quiet now and then. In the first couplet, too, the conditional “frown” would have been more elegant. But taken as detached passages, how admirably the different characters are drawn, so admirably that half the verses have become proverbial. This of Addison will bear reading again:--

“Peace to all such: but were there one whose fires True genius kindles and fair fame inspires; Blest with each talent and each art to please, And born to write, converse, and live with ease; Should such a man, too fond to rule alone, Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne, View him with scornful yet with jealous eyes, And hate for arts that caused himself to rise, Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike, Alike reserved to blame or to commend, A timorous foe and a suspicious friend; Dreading e’en fools, by flatterers besieged, And _so_ obliging that he ne’er obliged; Like Cato give his little Senate laws, And sit attentive to his own applause, While wits and templars every sentence raise, And wonder with a foolish face of praise;-- Who but must laugh if such a man there be? Who would not weep if Atticus were he?”

With the exception of the somewhat technical image in the second verse of Fame blowing the fire of genius, which too much puts us in mind of the frontispieces of the day, surely nothing better of its kind was ever written. How applicable it was to Addison I shall consider in another place. As an accurate intellectual observer and describer of personal weaknesses, Pope stands by himself in English verse.

In his epistle on the characters of women, no one who has ever known a noble woman, nay, I should almost say no one who ever had a mother or sister, will find much to please him. The climax of his praise rather degrades than elevates.

“O, blest in temper, whose unclouded ray Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day, She who can love a sister’s charms, or hear Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear, She who ne’er answers till a husband cools, Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules, Charms by accepting, by submitting sways, Yet has her humor most when she obeys; Lets fops or fortune fly which way they will, Disdains all loss of tickets or codille, Spleen, vapors, or smallpox, above them all And mistress of herself, though china fall.”

The last line is very witty and pointed,--but consider what an ideal of womanly nobleness he must have had, who praises his heroine for not being jealous of her daughter. Addison, in commending Pope’s “Essay on Criticism,” says, speaking of us “who live in the latter ages of the world”: “We have little else to do left us but to represent the _common sense_ of mankind, in more strong, more beautiful, or more uncommon lights.” I think he has here touched exactly the point of Pope’s merit, and, in doing so, tacitly excludes him from the position of poet, in the highest sense. Take two of Jeremy Taylor’s prose sentences about the Countess of Carbery, the lady in Milton’s “Comus”: “The religion of this excellent lady was of another constitution: it took root downward in humility, and brought forth fruit upward in the substantial graces of a Christian, in charity and justice, in chastity and modesty, in fair friendships and sweetness of society.... And though she had the greatest judgment, and the greatest experience of things and persons I ever yet knew in a person of her youth and sex and circumstances, yet, as if she knew nothing of it, she had the meanest opinion of herself, and like a fair taper, when she shined to all the room, yet round about her station she had cast a shadow and a cloud, and she shined to everybody but herself.” _This_ is poetry, though not in verse. The plays of the elder dramatists are not without examples of weak and vile women, but they are not without noble ones either. Take these verses of Chapman, for example:--

“Let no man value at a little price A virtuous woman’s counsel: her winged spirit Is feathered oftentimes with noble words And, like her beauty, ravishing and pure; The weaker body, still the stronger soul. O, what a treasure is a virtuous wife, Discreet and loving. Not one gift on earth Makes a man’s life so nighly bound to heaven. She gives him double forces to endure And to enjoy, being one with him, Feeling his joys and griefs with equal sense: If he fetch sighs, she draws her breath as short; If he lament, she melts herself in tears; If he be glad, she triumphs; if he stir, She moves his way, in all things his sweet ape, Himself divinely varied without change. All store without her leaves a man but poor, And with her poverty is exceeding store.”

Pope in the character I have read was drawing his ideal woman, for he says at the end that she shall be his muse. The sentiments are those of a _bourgeois_ and of the back parlor, more than of the poet and the muse’s bower. A man’s mind is known by the company it keeps.

Now it is very possible that the women of Pope’s time were as bad as they could be; but if God made poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful. I grant the influence of the age, but there is a sense in which the poet is of no age, and Beauty, driven from every other home, will never be an outcast and a wanderer, while there is a poet’s nature left, will never fail of the tribute at least of a song. It seems to me that Pope had a sense of the neat rather than of the beautiful. His nature delighted more in detecting the blemish than in enjoying the charm.

However great his merit in expression, I think it impossible that a true poet could have written such a satire as the Dunciad, which is even nastier than it is witty. It is filthy even in a filthy age, and Swift himself could not have gone beyond some parts of it. One’s mind needs to be sprinkled with some disinfecting fluid after reading it. I do not remember that any other poet ever made poverty a crime. And it is wholly without discrimination. De Foe is set in the pillory forever; and George Wither, the author of that charming poem, “Fair Virtue,” classed among the dunces. And was it not in this age that loose Dick Steele paid his wife the finest compliment ever paid to woman, when he said “that to love her was a liberal education”?

Even in the “Rape of the Lock,” the fancy is that of a wit rather than of a poet. It might not be just to compare his Sylphs with the Fairies of Shakespeare; but contrast the kind of fancy shown in the poem with that of Drayton’s Nymphidia, for example. I will give one stanza of it, describing the palace of the Fairy:--

“The walls of spider’s legs were made, Well mortised, and finely laid; (He was the master of his trade It curiously that builded:) The windows of the eyes of cats, And, for the roof, instead of slats ’Tis covered with the skins of bats, With moonshine that are gilded.”

In the last line the eye and fancy of a poet are recognized.

Personally we know more about Pope than about any of our poets. He kept no secrets about himself. If he did not let the cat out of the bag, he always contrived to give her tail a wrench so that we might know she was there. In spite of the savageness of his satires, his natural disposition seems to have been an amiable one, and his character as an author was as purely factitious as his style. Dr. Johnson appears to have suspected his sincerity; but artifice more than insincerity lay at the basis of his character. I think that there was very little real malice in him, and that his “evil was wrought from want of thought.” When Dennis was old and poor, he wrote a prologue for a play to be acted for his benefit. Except Addison, he numbered among his friends the most illustrious men of his time.

The correspondence of Pope is, on the whole, less interesting than that of any other eminent English poet, except that of Southey, and their letters have the same fault of being labored compositions. Southey’s are, on the whole, the more agreeable of the two, for they inspire one (as Pope’s certainly do not) with a sincere respect for the character of the writer. Pope’s are altogether too full of the proclamation of his own virtues to be pleasant reading. It is plain that they were mostly addressed to the public, perhaps even to posterity. But letters, however carefully drilled to be circumspect, are sure to blab, and those of Pope leave in the reader’s mind an unpleasant feeling of circumspection,--of an attempt to look as an eminent literary character should rather than as the man really was. They have the unnatural constraint of a man in full dress sitting for his portrait and endeavoring to look his best. We never catch him, if he can help it, at unawares. Among all Pope’s correspondents, Swift shows in the most dignified and, one is tempted to say, the most amiable light. It is creditable to the Dean that the letters which Pope addressed to him are by far the most simple and straightforward of any that he wrote. No sham could encounter those terrible eyes in Dublin without wincing. I think, on the whole, that a revision of judgment would substitute “discomforting consciousness of the public” for “insincerity” in judging Pope’s character by his letters. He could not shake off the habits of the author, and never, or almost never, in prose, acquired that knack of seeming carelessness that makes Walpole’s elaborate compositions such agreeable reading. Pope would seem to have kept a commonplace-book of phrases proper to this or that occasion; and he transfers a compliment, a fine moral sentiment, nay, even sometimes a burst of passionate ardor, from one correspondent to another, with the most cold-blooded impartiality. Were it not for this curious economy of his, no one could read his letters to Lady Wortley Montague without a conviction that they were written by a lover. Indeed, I think nothing short of the _spretæ injuria formæ_ will account for (though it will not excuse) the savage vindictiveness he felt and showed towards her. It may be suspected also that the bitterness of caste added gall to his resentment. His enemy wore that impenetrable armor of superior rank which rendered her indifference to his shafts the more provoking that it was unaffected. Even for us his satire loses its sting when we reflect that it is not in human nature for a woman to have had two such utterly irreconcilable characters as those of Lady Mary before and after her quarrel with the poet. In any view of Pope’s conduct in this affair, there is an ill savor in his attempting to degrade a woman whom he had once made sacred with his love. Spenser touches the right chord when he says of the Rosalind who had rejected him,

“Not, then, to her, that scornéd thing so base, But to myself the blame, that lookt so high; Yet so much grace let her vouchsafe to grant To simple swain, sith her I may not love, Yet that I may her honor paravant And praise her worth, though far my wit above; Such grace shall be some guerdon of the grief And long affliction which I have endured.”