Chapter 18

For Horace, as I have endeavored to explain in the note, the apology is so much the readier as his intrusions into this province of philosophy are slighter, more careless, and more indirect. But Pope's are wilful, premeditated, with malice aforethought; and his falsehoods wear a more malignant air, because they frequently concern truth speculative, and are therefore presumably more deliberate in their origin, and more influential in the result. It is precisely this part of Pope's errors that would prove most perplexing to the unlearned student. Beyond a doubt the 'Essay on Man' would, in virtue of its subject, prove the most attractive to a laboring man of all Pope's writings, as most of all promising a glimpse into a world of permanence and of mysterious grandeur, and having an interest, therefore, transcendent to any that could be derived from the fleeting aspects of manners or social conventionalisms, though illuminated and vivified by satire. _Here_ would be the most advantageous and _remunerative_ station to take for one who should undertake a formal exposure of Pope's hollow-heartedness; that is, it would most commensurately reward the pains and difficulties of such an investigation. But it would be too long a task for this situation, and it would be too polemic. It would move through a jungle of controversies. For, to quote a remark which I once made myself in print, the 'Essay on Man' in one point resembles some doubtful inscriptions in ancient forms of Oriental languages, which, being made up elliptically of mere consonants, can be read into very different senses according to the different sets of vowels which the particular reader may choose to interpolate. According to the choice of the interpreter, it may be read into a loyal or a treasonable meaning. Instead of this I prefer, as more amusing, as less elaborate, and as briefer, to expose a few of Pope's _personal_ falsehoods, and falsehoods as to the notorieties of _fact_. Truths speculative oftentimes, drives its roots into depth so dark, that the falsifications to which it is liable, though detected, cannot always be exposed to the light of day--the result is known, but not therefore seen. Truth personal, on the other hand, may be easily made to confront its falsifier, not with refutation only, but with the visible _shame_ of refutation. Such sharoe would settle upon _every_ page of Pope's satires and moral epistles, oftentimes upon every couplet, if any censor, armed with an adequate knowledge of the facts, were to prosecute the inquest. Apd the general impression from such an inquest would be, that Pope never delineated a character, nor uttered a sentiment, nor breathed an aspiration, which he, would not willingly have recast, have retracted, have abjured or trampled under foot with the curses assigned to heresy, if by sueh an act he could have added a hue of brilliancy to his coloring, or a new depth to his shadows. There is nothing he would not have sacrificed, not the most solemn of his opinions, nor the most pathetic memorial from his personal experiences, in return for a sufficient consideration, which consideration meant always with _him_ poetic effect. It is not, as too commonly is believed, that he was reckless of other people's feelings; so far from _that_, he had a morbid _facility_ in his kindness; and in cases where he had no reason to suspect any lurking hostility, he showed even a paralytic benignity. But, simply and constitutionally, he was incapable of a sincere thought or a sincere emotion. Nothing that ever he uttered, were it even a prayer to God, but he had a fancy for reading it backwards. And he was evermore false, not as loving or preferring falsehood, but as one who could not in his heart perceive much real difference between what people affected to call falsehood and what they affected to call truth. Volumes might be filled with illustrations; I content myself with three or four.

I. Pope felt _intellectually_ that it was philosophic, and also that it wore an air of nobility, _not_ to despise poverty. _Morally_, however, he felt inversely: nature and the accidents of his life had made it his necessity to despise nothing so heartily. If in any one sentiment he ever was absolutely sincere, if there can be cited one insulated case upon which he found it difficult to play the hypocrite, it was in the case of that intense scorn with which he regarded poverty, and all the painful circumstances that form the equipage of poverty. To look at a pale, dejected fellow-creature creeping along the highway, and to have reason for thinking that he has not tasted food since yesterday--what a pang would such a sight, accompanied by such a thought, inflict upon many a million of benign human hearts! But in Pope, left to his spontaneous nature, such a sight and such a thought would have moved only fits of laughter. Not that he would have refused the poor creature a shilling, but still he would have laughed. For hunger, and cold, and poverty, appeared to _him_ only in the light of drolleries, and too generally of scoundrelisms. Still he was aware that some caution was requisite in giving public expression to such feelings. Accordingly, when he came forward in gala-dress as a philosopher, he assumed the serene air of one upon whom all such idle distinctions as rich and poor were literally thrown away. But watch him: follow his steps for a few minutes, and the deep realities of his nature will unmask themselves. For example, in the first book of the 'Dunciad' he has occasion to mention Dennis:--

'And all the mighty mad in Dennis raged.'

Upon this line (the 106th) of the text he hangs a note, in the course of which he quotes a few sentences about Dennis from Theobald. One of these begins thus: 'Did we really know how much this poor man suffers by being contradicted,' &c.; upon which Pope thinks proper to intercalate the following pathetic parenthesis in italics: _I wish that reflection on POVERTY had been spared._' How amiable! how pretty! Could Joseph Surface have more dexterously _improved_ the occasion: 'The man that disparages poverty, is a man that--' &c. It is manifest, however, at a glance, that this virtuous indignation is altogether misplaced; for '_poor_' in the quotation from Theobald has no reference whatever to _poverty_ as the antithesis to _wealth_. What a pity that a whole phial of such excellent scenical morality should thus have been uncorked and poured out upon the wrong man and the wrong occasion! Really, this unhappy blunder extorts from me as many tears of laughter as ever poverty extorted from Pope. Meantime, reader, watch what follows. Wounded so deeply in his feelings by this constrained homage to poverty, Pope finds himself unable to resettle the equilibrium in his nervous system until he has taken out his revenge by an extra kicking administered to some old mendicant or vagrant lying in a ditch.

At line 106 comes the flourish about Dennis's poverty. Just nine lines ahead, keeping close as a policeman upon the heels' of a thief, you come up with Pope in the very act of maltreating Gibber, upon no motive or pretence whatever, small or great, but that he (the said Gibber) was guilty of poverty. Pope had detected him--and this is Pope's own account of the assault--in an overt act of poverty. He deposes, as if it were an ample justification of his own violence, that Gibber had been caught in the very act--not of supping meanly, coarsely, vulgarly, as upon tripe, for instance, or other offal--but absolutely in the act of not supping at all!

'Swearing and _supperless_ the hero sate.'

Here one is irresistibly reminded of the old story about the cat who was transformed into a princess: she played the _role_ with admirable decorum, until one day a mouse ran across the floor of the royal saloon, when immediately the old instinct and the hereditary hatred proved too much for the artificial nature, and her highness vanished over a six-barred gate in a furious mouse-chase. Pope, treading in the steps of this model, fancies himself reconciled to poverty. Poverty, however, suddenly presents herself, not as a high poetic abstraction, but in that one of her many shapes which to Pope had always seemed the most comic as well as the most hateful. Instantly Pope's ancient malice is rekindled; and in line 115 we find him assaulting that very calamity under one name, which under another, at line 106, he had treated with an ostentatious superfluity of indulgence.

II. I have already noticed that some of Pope's most pointed examples which he presents to you as drawn from his own experience of life, are in fact due to jest-books; and some (offered as facts) are pure coinages of his own brain. When he makes his miser at the last gasp so tenacious of the worldly rights then slipping from his grasp as that he refuses to resign a particular manor, Pope forgot that even a jest-book must govern its jokes by some regard to the realities of life, and that amongst these realities is the very nature and operation of a will. A miser is not, therefore, a fool; and he knows that no possible testamentary abdication of an estate disturbs his own absolute command over it so long as he lives, or bars his power of revoking the bequest. The moral instruction is in this case so poor, that no reader cares much upon what sort of foundation the story itself rests. For such a story a lie may be a decent basis. True; but not so senseless a lie. If the old miser was delirious, there is an end of his responsibilities; and nobody has a right to draw upon _him_ for moral lessons or warnings. If he was _not_ delirirous, the case could not have happened. Modelled in the same spirit are all Pope's pretended portraitures of women; and the more they ought to have been true, as professing to be studies from life, the more atrociously they are false, and false in the transcendent sense of being impossible. Heaps of contradiction, or of revolting extravagance, do not verify themselves to our loathing incredulity because the artist chooses to come forward with his arms akimbo, saying angrily, 'But I tell you, sir, these are _not_ fancy-pieces! These ladies whom I have here lampooned are familiarly known to me--they are my particular friends. I see them every day in the undiess of confiding friendship. They betray all their foibles to me in the certainty that I shall take no advantage of their candor; and will you, coming a century later, presume to dispute the fidelity or the value of my contemporary portraits?' Yes, and upon these two grounds: first (as to the fidelity), that the pretended portraits are delineations of impossible people; and secondly (as to the value), that, if after all they could be sworn to as copies faithful to the originals, not the less are they to be repelled as abnormal, and so far beyond the intelligibilities of nature as practically to mean nothing, neither teaching nor warning. The two Duchesses of Marlborough, for instance, Sarah and Henrietta, are atrocious caricatures, and constructed on the desperate principle of catching at a momentary stare or grin, by means of anarchy in the features imputed, and truculent antithesis in the expression. Who does not feel that these are the fierce pasquinades, and the coarse pasquinades, of some malignant electioneering contest? Is there a line that breathes the simplicity and single-heartedness of truth? Equal disgust settles upon every word that Pope ever wrote against Lady Mary W. Montagu. Having once come to hate her rancorously, and finding his hatred envenomed by the consciousness that Lady Mary had long ceased to care two straws for all the malice of all the wits in Christendom, Pope labored at his own spite, filing it and burnishing it as a hand-polisher works at the the blade of a scymitar. For years he had forgotten to ask after the realities of nature as they existed in Lady Mary, and considered only what had the best chance of stinging her profoundly. He looked out for a 'raw' into which he might lay the lash; not seeking it in the real woman, but generally in the nature and sensibilities of abstract woman. Whatever seemed to disfigure the idea of womanhood, _that_, by reiterated touches, he worked into his portraits of Lady Mary; and at length, no doubt, he had altogether obliterated from his own remembrance the true features of her whom he so much detested. On this class of Pope's satiric sketches I do not, however, wish to linger, having heretofore examined some of the more prominent cases with close attention.

My last paper on Pope has been taxed with exaggeration. This charge comes from a London weekly journal (_The Leader_) distinguished by its ability, by its hardihood of speculation, by its comprehensive candor, but, in _my_ eyes, still more advantageously distinguished by its deep sincerity. Such qualities give a special value to the courtesies of that journal; and I in particular, as a literary man, have to thank it for repeated instances of kindness the most indulgent on any occasion which has brought up the mention of my name. Such qualities of necessity give a corresponding value to its censures. And accordingly, as a point of duty, I directed my attention immediately to _this_ censure. Whatever was still unprinted I reviewed; and whatever struck me as open to objection I removed. And if the result after all has been that I do not altogether concur in the criticism of _The Leader_, the reason is because, as upon re-examination it strikes me, in the worst cases Pope has not left room for exaggeration. I do not see any actual exaggeration, simply because I do not see that any exaggeration is possible. But though I thus found myself unable sincerely to make the sacrifice of my own opinion, another sacrifice of a different kind I _have_ made, viz., that of half my paper. I cancelled one half--viz., that half which was occupied with cases in Pope of disingenuousness, and perhaps of moral falsehood or collusion with other people's falsehood, but not of falsehood atrociously literal and conscious; meaning thus to diminish by one half the penance of those who do not like to see Pope assaulted, although forced by uneasiness to watch the assault;--feeling with which I heartily sympathize; and meaning, on the other hand, in justification of mylelf, to throw the reader's attention more effectively, because more exclusively, upon such cases of frantic and moonstruck falsehood as could allow no room for suspense or mitigation of judgment. Of these I have selected two, one relating to the Duke of Buckingham, and the other to the history and derivation of English literature. Generally, I believe, that to a just appreciation of Pope's falseness, levity, and self-contradiction, it is almost essential that a reader should have studied him with the purpose of becoming his editor. This at one time was my own purpose; and thus it was that I became acquainted with qualities prevailing in Pope which, in the midst of my great admiration for him, would have made such a purpose difficult of execution. For in the relation between author and editor, any harshness of reproach on the part of the latter, or any expression of alienation and imperfect sympathy, seems unbecoming in one who has spontaneously assumed the office of a _patronus_ to a _client_, and are uniformly painful to the reader. On this account it is that the late Mr. Roscoe figures amongst all editors of Pope as by far the most agreeable. He has a just tenderness for the memory and merits of the great writer whom he undertakes to edit; this feeling keeps his annotations clear from the petulance of Joseph Warton and the malice of Bowles; whilst, not having happened to see Pope's errors in the same light as myself, he suffers from no conflict between his natural indulgence to intellectual splendor and his conscientious reverence for truth.

But if the reader is shocked with Pope's false reading of phenomena, where not the circumstances so much as the construction of the circumstances may be challenged, what must he think of those cases in which downright facts, and incidents the most notorious, have been outrageously falsified only in obedience to a vulgar craving for effect in the dramatic situations, or by way of pointing a moral for the stimulation of torpid sensibilities? Take, for instance, the death of the second Villiers, Duke of Buckingham--a story which, in Pope's version of it, has travelled into a popularity that may be called national; and yet, the whole is one tissue of falsehoods--and of falsehoods that must have been known for such by Pope not less than to most of his contemporary readers. Suppose them _not_ known, and the whole must have wanted all natural interest. For this interest lay in the Duke's character, in his superb accomplishments and natural advantages, in his fine person, in his vast wealth, and in the admirable versatility of his intellectual powers, which made him alternately the idol and the terror of all circles that he approached, which caused Lord Clarendon to tremble with impotent malice in his chancellor's robes, and Dry den to shiver with panic under his laureate crowns. Now, wherever these features of the case were _not_ known, the story was no more than any ordinary death arising out of a fox-chase. But those to whom they _were_ known must, at the same time, have known the audacious falsehood which disfigures the story in Pope's way of telling it. _Without_ the personal interest, the incidents were nothing; and _with_ that interest, at starting, Pope's romance must have defeated itself by its fabulous coloring. Let me recall to the reader the principal lines in this famous description:--

'In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half hung, The floors of plaster and the walls of dung, On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw, With tape-tied curtains never meant to draw, The George and Garter dangling from that bed Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red, Great Villiers lies! Alas! how changed from him, That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim, Gallant and gay in Cliveden's proud alcove, The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love; _There_, victor of his health, of fortune, friends, And fame, the lord of useless thousands ends.'

Without stopping to examine these famous lines as to thought and expression (both of which are scandalously vicious), what I wish the reader to remark is, the one pervading falsehood which connects them. Wherefore this minute and purely fanciful description of the road-side _cabaret_, with its bedroom and bed? Wherefore this impertinent and also fraudulent circumstantiality? It is, as Pope would tell you, for the sake of impressing with more vivacity the abject poverty to which the Duke's follies had brought him. The wretched bed, for instance, is meant to be the exponent of the empty purse which could purchase no better. And, for fear that you might miss this construction of the passage, Pope himself tells you, in a prose note, that the Duke 'died in a remote inn in Yorkshire, _reduced to the utmost misery_.' Being engaged in the business of dying, it could hardly be expected that the Duke should be particularly happy. But what Pope means you to understand by 'misery' is _poverty_; the prose note simply reiterates the words, 'victor of _fortune_,' in the text. Now, had the truth been really so, what moral would such a story exemplify beyond the vulgar one of pecuniary improvidence? And yet surely this was not the cause of the Duke's being thrown from his horse. Meantime, Pope well knew that the whole was a ridiculous fable. The Duke had the misfortune to be fatally injured in a fox-chase. In such an extremity, naturally, his servants carry him into the house nearest at hand, which happens to be an alehouse--not 'the worst,' since there was no other; nor was it possible that, to a man of his distinction, once the lord-lieutenant of that very East Riding, any room would be offered worse than the very best that contained a bed. In these dreadful circumstances, it is not easy to measure the levity which can linger upon the description of such exquisite impertinences as the housewifely defects of the walls, the curtains, the flock-bed, &c. But Pope was at his wit's end for a striking falsehood. He needed for a momentary effect some tale of a great lord, once fabulously rich, who had not left himself the price of a halter or of a pauper's bed. And thus, for the sake of extorting a stare of wonderment from a mob of gaping readers, he did not scruple to give birth and currency to the grossest of legendary lies. The Duke's death happened a few months before Pope's birth. But the last of the Villiers family that wore a ducal coronet was far too memorable a person to have died under the cloud of obscurity which Pope's representation presumes. He was the most interesting person of the Alcibiades class [Footnote 9] that perhaps ever existed; and Pope's mendacious story found acceptance only amongst an after-generation unacquainted with the realities of the case. There was not so much as a popular rumor to countenance Pope. The story was a pure, gratuitous invention of his own. Even at the time of his death, the Duke of Buckingham was generally reputed to have sixty thousand per annum, and chiefly from land; an income at that period absolutely without precedent or parallel in Europe. In this there might be some exaggeration, as usually there _is_ in such cases. But the 'Fairfax Papers' have recently made it manifest that Pope's tale was the wildest of fictions. The Duke of Buckingham had, to some extent, suffered from his loyalty to the Crown, though apparently sheltered from the main fury of the storm by the interest of his Presbyterian father-in-law; and in his own person he had at one time been carelessly profuse. But all this was nothing. The sting of Pope's story requires him to have been a pauper; and yet--O heaven and incredulous earth!--a pauper hunting upon blood-horses, in a star and garter, and perhaps in a collar of SS! The plain, historical truth, meanwhile, survives, that this pauper was simply the richest man in Christendom; and that, except Aladdin (Oh, yes; always except Aladdin of the Arabian Nights!) there never had been a richer. And thus collapses the whole fable, like a soap-bubble punctured by a surgeon's probe.