Chapter 3

In 1664 _Paradise Lost_ was finished, but as in 1665 came the Great Plague, and after the Great Plague the Great Fire, it was long before the MS. found its way into the hands of the licenser. It is interesting to note that the first member of the general public who read _Paradise Lost_, I hope all through, was a clergyman of the name of Tomkyns, the deputy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Sheldon. The Archbishop was the State Licenser for religious books, but of course did not do the work himself. Tomkyns did the work, and was for a good while puzzled what to make of the old Republican's poem. At last, and after some singularly futile criticisms, Tomkyns consented to allow the publication of _Paradise Lost_, which accordingly appeared in 1667, admirably printed, and at the price of 3_s._ a copy. The author's agreement with the publisher is in writing--as Mr. Besant tells us all agreements with publishers should be--and may be seen in the British Museum. Its terms are clear. The poet was to have 5 down pounds; another 5 pounds when the first edition, which was not to exceed 1,500 copies, was sold; a third 5 pounds when a second edition was sold; and a fourth and last 5 pounds when a third edition was sold. He got his first 5 pounds, also his second, and after his death his widow sold all her rights for 5 pounds. Consequently 18 pounds, which represents perhaps 50 pounds of our present currency, was Milton's share of all the money that has been made by the sale of his great poem. But the praise is still his. The sale was very considerable. The 'general reader' no doubt preferred the poems of Cleaveland and Flatman, but Milton found an audience which was fit and not fewer than ever is the case when noble poetry is first produced.

_Paradise Regained_ was begun upon the completion of _Paradise Lost_, and appeared with _Samson Agonistes_ in 1671, and here ended Milton's life as a producing poet. He lived on till Sunday, 8th November, 1674, when the gout, or what was then called gout, struck in and he died, and was buried beside his father in the Church of St. Giles's, Cripplegate. He remained laborious to the last, and imposed upon himself all kinds of drudgery, compiling dictionaries, histories of Britain and Russia. He must have worked not so much from love of his subjects as from dread of idleness. But he had hours of relaxation, of social intercourse, and of music; and it is pleasant to remember that one pipe of tobacco. It consecrates your own.

Against Milton's great poem it is sometimes alleged that it is not read; and yet it must, I think, be admitted that for one person who has read Spenser's _Fairy Queen_, ten thousand might easily be found who have read _Paradise Lost_. Its popularity has been widespread. Mr. Mark Pattison and Mr. John Bright measure some ground between them. No other poem can be mentioned which has so coloured English thought as Milton's, and yet, according to the French senator whom Mr. Arnold has introduced to the plain reader, '_Paradise Lost_ is a false poem, a grotesque poem, a tiresome poem.' It is not easy for those who have a touch of Milton's temper, though none of his genius, to listen to this foreign criticism quite coolly. Milton was very angry with Salmasius for venturing to find fault with the Long Parliament for having repealed so many laws, and so far forgot himself as to say, '_Nam nostrae leges_, _Ole_, _quid ad te_?' But there is nothing municipal about _Paradise Lost_. All the world has a right to be interested in it and to find fault with it. But the fact that the people for whom primarily it was written have taken it to their hearts and have it on their lips ought to have prevented it being called tiresome by a senator of France.

But what is the matter with our great epic? That nobody ever wished it longer is no real accusation. Nobody ever did wish an epic longer. The most popular books in the world are generally accounted too long--_Don Quixote_, the _Pilgrim's Progress_, _Tom Jones_. But, says Mr. Arnold, the whole real interest of the poem depends upon our being able to take it literally; and again, 'Merely as matter of poetry, the story of the Fall has no special force or effectiveness--its effectiveness for us comes, and can only come, from our taking it all as the literal narrative of what positively happened.' These bewildering utterances make one rub one's eyes. Carlyle comes to our relief: 'All which propositions I for the present content myself with modestly, but peremptorily and irrevocably denying.'

Mr. Pattison surely speaks the language of ordinary good sense when he writes: 'For the world of _Paradise Lost_ is an ideal, conventional world quite as much as the world of the _Arabian Nights_, or the world of the chivalrous romance, or that of the pastoral novel.'

Coleridge, in the twenty-second chapter of the _Biographia Literaria_, points out that the fable and characters of _Paradise Lost_ are not derived from Scripture, as in the _Messiah_ of Klopstock, but merely suggested by it--the illusion on which all poetry is founded being thus never contradicted. The poem proceeds upon a legend, ancient and fascinating, and to call it a commentary upon a few texts in Genesis is a marvellous criticism.

The story of the Fall of Man, as recorded in the Semitic legend, is to me more attractive as a story than the Tale of Troy, and I find the rebellion of Satan and his dire revenge more to my mind than the circles of Dante. Eve is, I think, more interesting than 'Heaven-born Helen, Sparta's queen'--I mean in herself, and as a woman to write poetry about.

The execution of the poem is another matter. So far as style is concerned its merits have not yet been questioned. As a matter of style and diction, Milton is as safe as Virgil. The handling of the story is more vulnerable. The long speeches put in the mouth of the Almighty are never pleasing, and seldom effective. The weak point about argument is that it usually admits of being answered. For Milton to essay to justify the ways of God to man was well and pious enough, but to represent God Himself as doing so by argumentative process was not so well, and was to expose the Almighty to possible rebuff. The king is always present in his own courts, but as judge, not as advocate; hence the royal dignity never suffers.

It is narrated of an eminent barrister, who became a most polished judge, Mr. Knight Bruce, that once, when at the very head of his profession, he was taken in before a Master in Chancery, an office since abolished, and found himself pitted against a little snip of an attorney's clerk, scarce higher than the table, who, nothing daunted, and by the aid of authorities he cited from a bundle of books as big as himself, succeeded in worsting Knight Bruce, whom he persisted in calling over again and again 'my learned friend.' Mr. Bruce treated the imp with that courtesy which is always an opponent's due, but he never went before the Masters any more.

The Archangel has not escaped the reproach often brought against affable persons of being a bit of a bore, and though this is to speak unbecomingly, it must be owned that the reader is glad whenever Adam plucks up heart of grace and gets in a word edgeways. Mr. Bagehot has complained of Milton's angels. He says they are silly. But this is, I think, to intellectualize too much. There are some classes who are fairly exempted from all obligation to be intelligent, and these airy messengers are surely amongst that number. The retinue of a prince or of a bride justify their choice if they are well-looking and group nicely.

But these objections do not touch the main issue. Here is the story of the loss of Eden, told enchantingly, musically, and in the grand style. 'Who,' says M. Scherer, in a passage quoted by Mr. Arnold, 'can read the eleventh and twelfth books without yawning?' People, of course, are free to yawn when they please, provided they put their hands to their mouths; but in answer to this insulting question one is glad to be able to remember how Coleridge has singled out Adam's vision of future events contained in these books as especially deserving of attention. But to read them is to repel the charge.

There was no need for Mr. Arnold, of all men, to express dissatisfaction with Milton:

'Words which no ear ever to hear in heaven Expected; least of all from thee, ingrate, In place thyself so high above thy peers.'

The first thing for people to be taught is to enjoy great things greatly. The spots on the sun may be an interesting study, but anyhow the sun is not all spots. Indeed, sometimes in the early year, when he breaks forth afresh,

'And winter, slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring,

we are apt to forget that he has any spots at all, and, as he shines, are perhaps reminded of the blind poet sitting in his darkness, in this prosaic city of ours, swinging his leg over the arm of his chair, and dictating the lines:

'Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose, Or flocks or herds, or human face divine. But cloud instead, and ever-during dark Surrounds me--from the cheerful ways of men Cut off; and for the book of knowledge fair Presented with a universal blank Of nature's works, to me expunged and razed And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out. So much the rather, Thou, Celestial Light, Shine inwards, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate--_there_ plant eyes; all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight.'

Coleridge added a note to his beautiful poem, 'The Nightingale,' lest he should be supposed capable of speaking with levity of a single line in Milton. The note was hardly necessary, but one loves the spirit that prompted him to make it. Sainte-Beuve remarks: 'Parler des poetes est toujours une chose bien delicate, et surtout quand on l'a ete un peu soi- meme.' But though it does not matter what the little poets do, great ones should never pass one another without a royal salute.

POPE.

_A Lecture delivered at Birmingham before the Midland Institute_.

The eighteenth century has been well abused by the nineteenth. So far as I can gather, it is the settled practice of every century to speak evil of her immediate predecessor, and I have small doubt that, had we gone groping about in the tenth century, we should yet have been found hinting that the ninth was darker than she had any need to be.

But our tone of speaking about the last century has lately undergone an alteration. The fact is, we are drawing near our own latter end. The Head Master of Harrow lately thrilled an audience by informing them that he had, that very day, entered an existing _bona fide_ boy upon the school books, whose education, however, would not begin till the twentieth century. As a parent was overheard to observe, 'An illustration of that sort comes home to one.' The older we grow the less confident we become, the readier to believe that our judgments are probably wrong, and liable, and even likely, to be reversed; the better disposed to live and let live. The child, as Mr. Browning has somewhere elaborated, cries for the moon and beats its nurse, but the old man sips his gruel with avidity and thanks Heaven if nobody beats him. And so we have left off beating the eighteenth century. It was not so, however, in our lusty prime. Carlyle, historian though he was of Frederick the Great and the French Revolution, revenged himself for the trouble it gave him by loading it with all vile epithets. If it had been a cock or a cook he could not have called it harder names. It was century spendthrift, fraudulent, bankrupt, a swindler century, which did but one true action, 'namely, to blow its brains out in that grand universal suicide named French Revolution.'

The leaders of the neo-Catholic movement very properly shuddered at a century which whitewashed its churches and thought even monthly communions affected. The ardent Liberal could not but despise a century which did without the franchise, and, despite the most splendid materials, had no Financial Reform Almanack. The sentimental Tory found little to please him in the House of Hanover and Whig domination. The lovers of poetry, with Shelley in their ears and Wordsworth at their hearts, made merry with the trim muses of Queen Anne, with their sham pastorals, their dilapidated classicism, and still more with their town- bred descriptions of the country, with its purling brooks and nodding groves, and, hanging over all, the moon--not Shelley's 'orbed maiden,' but 'the refulgent lamp of night.' And so, on all hands, the poor century was weighed in a hundred different balances and found wanting. It lacked inspiration, unction, and generally all those things for which it was thought certain the twentieth century would commend us. But we do not talk like that now. The waters of the sullen Lethe, rolling doom, are sounding too loudly in our own ears. We would die at peace with all centuries. Mr. Frederic Harrison writes a formal _Defence of the Eighteenth Century_, Mr. Matthew Arnold reprints half a dozen of Dr. Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_. Mr. Leslie Stephen composes a history of thought during this objurgated period, and also edits, in sumptuously inconvenient volumes, the works of its two great novelists, Richardson and Fielding; and, finally, there now trembles on the very verge of completion a splendid and long-laboured edition of the poems and letters of the great poet of the eighteenth century, the abstract and brief chronicle of his time, a man who had some of its virtues and most of its vices, one whom it is easy to hate, but still easier to quote--Alexander Pope.

Twenty years ago the chances were that a lecturer on Pope began by asking the, perhaps not impertinent, question, 'Was he a poet?' And the method had its merits, for the question once asked, it was easy for the lecturer, like an incendiary who has just fired a haystack, to steal away amidst the cracklings of a familiar controversy. It was not unfitting that so quarrelsome a man as Pope should have been the occasion of so much quarrelsomeness in others. For long the battle waged as fiercely over Pope's poetry as erst it did in his own _Homer_ over the body of the slain Patroclus. Stout men took part in it, notably Lord Byron, whose letters to Mr. Bowles on the subject, though composed in his lordship's most ruffianly vein, still make good reading--of a sort. But the battle is over, at all events for the present. It is not now our humour to inquire too curiously about first causes or primal elements. As we are not prepared with a definition of poetry, we feel how impossible it would be for us to deny the rank of a poet to one whose lines not infrequently scan and almost always rhyme. For my part, I should as soon think of asking whether a centipede has legs or a wasp a sting as whether the author of the _Rape of the Lock_ and the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_ was or was not a poet.

Pope's life has been described as a succession of petty secrets and third- rate problems, but there seems to be no doubt that it began on May 21st, 1688, in Lombard Street, in the city of London. But this event over, mystery steps in with the question, What was his father? The occupation of the elder Pope occasioned nearly as fierce a controversy as the poetical legitimacy of the younger. Malice has even hinted that old Pope was a hatter. The poet, of course, knew, but wouldn't tell, being always more ready, as Johnson observes, to say what his father was not than what he was. He denied the hatter, and said his father was of the family of the Earls of Downe; but on this statement being communicated to a relative of the poet, the brutal fellow, who was probably without a tincture of polite learning, said he heard of the relationship for the first time! 'Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure,' sang one of Pope's too numerous enemies in the easy numbers he had taught his age. It is, however, now taken as settled that the elder Pope, like Izaak Walton and John Gilpin, and many other good fellows, was a linen-draper. He made money, and one would like to know how he did it in the troublesome times he lived in; but _his_ books have all perished. He was a Roman Catholic, as also was the poet's mother, who was her husband's second wife, and came out of Yorkshire. It used to be confidently asserted that the elder Pope, on retiring from business, which he did early in the poet's childhood, put his fortune in a box and spent it as he needed it,--a course of conduct the real merits of which are likely to be hid from a lineal descendant. Old Pope, however, did nothing of the kind, but invested money in the French funds, his conscience not allowing him to do so in the English, and he also lent sums on bond to fellow-Catholics, one of whom used to remit him his half-year's interest calculated at the rate of 4 pounds per cent. per annum, whereas by the terms of the bond he was to pay 4.25 pounds per cent. per annum. On another occasion the same borrower deducted from the interest accrued due a pound he said he had lent the youthful poet. These things annoyed the old gentleman, as they would most old gentlemen of my acquaintance. The poet was the only child of his mother, and a queerly constituted mortal he was. Dr. Johnson has recorded the long list of his infirmities with an almost chilling bluntness; but, alas! so malformed was Pope's character, so tortuous and twisted were his ways, so elaborately artificial and detestably petty many of his devices, that it is not malice, but charity, that bids us remember that, during his whole maturity, he could neither dress nor undress himself, go to bed or get up without help, and that on rising he had to be invested with a stiff canvas bodice and tightly laced, and have put on him a fur doublet and numerous stockings to keep off the cold and fill out his shrunken form. If ever there was a man whose life was one long provocation, that man was the author of the _Dunciad_. Pope had no means of self-defence save his wit. Dr. Johnson was a queer fellow enough, having inherited, as he tells us, a vile melancholy from his father, and he certainly was no Adonis to look at, but those who laughed at him were careful to do so behind his gigantic back. When a rapacious bookseller insulted him he knocked him down. When the caricaturist Foote threatened to take him off upon the stage, the most Christian of lexicographers caused it to be intimated to him that if he did the author of _Rasselas_ would thrash him in the public street, and the buffoon desisted. 'Did not Foote,' asked Boswell, 'think of exhibiting you, sir?' and our great moralist replied, 'Sir, fear restrained him; he knew I would have broken his bones.' When he denounced Macpherson for his _Ossian_ frauds, and the irate Celt said something about personal chastisement, Johnson told him, in writing, that he was not to be deterred from detecting a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian, and by way of a temporary provision for his self-defence selected a most grievous cudgel, six feet in height, and terminating in a head (once the root) of the size of a large orange. The possession of great physical strength is no mean assistance to a straightforward life. The late Professor Fawcett, who, though blind, delighted, arm-in-arm with a friend, to skate furiously on the fens, never could be brought to share the fears entertained on his behalf by some of the less stalwart of his acquaintances. 'Why,' he used to exclaim apologetically, 'even if I do run up against anybody, it is always the other fellow who gets the worst of it.' But poor Pope, whom a child could hustle, had no such resources. We should always remember this; it is brutal to forget it.

Pope's parents found in their only son the vocation of their later life. He might be anything he liked. Did he lisp in numbers, the boyish rhymes were duly scanned and criticised; had he a turn for painting, lessons were provided. He might be anything he chose, and everything by turns. Many of us have been lately reading chapters from the life of another only son, and though the comparison may not bear working out, still, that there were points of strong similarity between the days of the youthful poet at Binfield and those of Ruskin at Herne Hill may be suspected. Pope's education was, of course, private, for a double reason--his proscribed faith and his frail form. Mr. Leslie Stephen, with a touching faith in public schools, has the hardihood to regret that it was obviously impossible to send Pope to Westminster. One shudders at the thought. It could only have ended in an inquest. As it was, the poor little cripple was whipped at Twyford for lampooning his master. Pope was extraordinarily sensitive. Cruelty to animals he abhorred. Every kind of sport, from spinning cockchafers to coursing hares, he held in loathing, and one cannot but be thankful that the childhood of this supersensitive poet was shielded from the ruffianism of the nether world of boys as that brood then existed. Westminster had not long to wait for Cowper. Pope was taught his rudiments by stray priests and at small seminaries, where, at all events, he had his bent, and escaped the contagious error that Homer wrote in Greek in order that English boys might be beaten. Of course he did not become a scholar. Had he done so he probably would not have translated Homer, though he might have lectured on how not to do it. Indeed, the only evidence we have that Pope knew Greek at all is that he translated Homer, and was accustomed to carry about with him a small pocket edition of the bard in the original. Latin he could probably read with decent comfort, though it is noticeable that if he had occasion to refer to a Latin book, and there was a French translation, he preferred the latter version to the original. Voltaire, who knew Pope, asserts that he could not speak a word of French, and could hardly read it; but Voltaire was not a truthful man, and on one occasion told lies in an affidavit. The fact is, Pope's curiosity was too inordinate--his desire to know everything all at once too strong--to admit of the delay of learning a foreign language; and he was consequently a reader of translations, and he lived in an age of translations. He was, as a boy, a simply ferocious reader, and was early acquainted with the contents of the great poets, both of antiquity and the modern world. His studies, at once intense, prolonged, and exciting, injured his feeble health, and made him the lifelong sufferer he was. It was a noble zeal, and arose from the immense interest Pope ever took in human things.