ALEXANDER POPE (1688–1744)
1. His Life. Pope was born in London, the only child of a considerable city tradesman. From his birth two conditions were to influence very deeply the career of the future poet: first, he was puny and delicate, and, secondly, he was baptized into the Roman Catholic faith. His bodily infirmity, which amounted almost to deformity, caused him to be privately educated; and to the end of his life his knowledge had that extensive range, joined to the liability to make the grossest blunders, which is so often the mark of an eager and precocious intelligence imperfectly trained. Pope’s religious faith, though he was never excessively devout as a Roman Catholic, closed to him all the careers, professional and political, in which a man of his keen intelligence might have been expected to succeed. He was thus forced into the pursuit of letters as his only road to fame. From his earliest youth we find him passionately desirous of making his name as an author.
His youth was passed at Binfield, his father’s small estate near Windsor Forest. Before he was twenty years old he got into touch with Wycherley, now old and besotted. Through him Pope became acquainted with Addison, Swift, and Steele, whose friendship he eagerly cultivated. His early verses, admirably attuned to the ear of the age, brought him recognition and applause; his translation of Homer brought him wealth; and from that point he never looked back. He became the dominating poetical personality of the day. In 1718 he removed to his house at Twickenham, whose pinchbeck beauties became the wonder, envy, and derision of literary and social London. It remained his home till “that long disease, his life,” was finished in 1744.
2. His Character. In this book it is fortunately seldom that we are called upon to analyze the character of an English writer in any detail, but in the case of Pope it is necessary. With no man more than Pope are such personal considerations relevant and cogent; for in no writings more than in Pope’s do we find the author’s vices and his weaknesses—as well as his virtues—so fully portrayed.
By the time he was thirty Pope’s hands were full of the gifts of fortune, but he was far from being happy. He was so easily stung that his numerous detractors were irresistibly impelled to sting him; and his agonies, his vicious petulance, and his wild retaliation were so pathetic and yet so ludicrous that his foes were incited to try his temper again. Hence much of Pope’s life was a series of skirmishes with friends and foes alike. His disposition, too, had so many flaws that it trembled at the pressure of a finger. His stinginess, though he was rich beyond the dreams of a poet’s avarice, was a byword. His snobbishness was extreme; he fawned before lords, and he assailed his less fortunate poetical brethren with a rancor whose very coarseness blunts its edge. His vanity was egregious, and shrank from criticism as a raw nerve shrinks from fire. His nature stooped to actions so tortuous and reprehensible that his biographers confess, with a sigh of relief, that they cannot get quite to the bottom of them. His procedure in the publication of some of his work almost stupefies the investigator with its combination of duplicity, bad faith, and sheer cross-grained perversion of the truth.
Yet he had his virtues, to which his friends testified with a curious half-laughing mixture of contempt and admiration. He could sometimes be generous in a crabbed, distorted fashion; and if only his friends allowed for his weaknesses, he repaid their consideration with a devoted cordiality that defied the shocks of fortune. At bottom his nature was not unkindly, but it was corroded and overlaid with the effects of his physical weakness, with his natural vanity, and with a shrinking self-criticism. And, above all, he was an artist. He lived for his art; everything he wrote was stamped with the joy of creation and his desire for perfection and permanency; and it is as an artist that he will finally be judged.
3. His Poetry. “I lisped in numbers,” he tells us. But his earliest work of any importance is his Pastorals. According to his own statement (which need not be believed) they were begun when he was sixteen years old. They appeared in 1709, when he was twenty-one. They contain the usual trumpery of “sylvan strains,” “warbling Philomel,” and other expressions that are the bane of the artificial pastoral. Yet though the work is immature in some respects, it shows that Pope has found his feet with regard to his metrical method. The poem is written in the heroic couplet, which is neat, effective, and melodious in a namby-pamby fashion. We give a specimen of his earliest numbers:
And yet my numbers please the rural throng,
Rough satyrs dance, and Pan applauds the song:
The nymphs, forsaking ev’ry cave and spring,
Their early fruit, and milk-white turtles bring;
Each am’rous nymph prefers her gifts in vain,
On you their gifts are all bestowed again.
For you the swains the fairest flow’rs design,
And in one garland all their beauties join;
Accept the wreath which you deserve alone,
In whom all beauties are compris’d in one.
In 1711 appeared the Essay on Criticism, also written in heroic couplets. The poem professes to set forth the gospel of “wit” and “nature” as it applies to the literature of the period. The work is clearly immature. There is nothing novel in its theories, which are conventionality itself; but it dresses the aged theories so neatly and freshly that the poem is a lasting monument to the genius of the writer. It is full of apt, quotable lines that have become imbedded in the language:
A little learning is a dangerous thing!...
And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art....
To err is human: to forgive, divine....
True wit is nature to advantage dressed....
Windsor Forest (1713) is another pastoral in the familiar meter. Artificial still, it nevertheless shows a broader treatment, and a still stronger grip of the stopped couplet.
By this time Pope was well known, and he set about his ambitious scheme of translating the Iliad, which was eventually issued in 1720. For the book, as he was zealously assisted by his literary friends, he was successful in compiling a phenomenal subscription list, which (with the additional translation of the Odyssey) brought him more than ten thousand pounds. Such a triumph produced the inevitable reaction on the part of his critics, who maintained that Pope knew little Latin and less Greek, and that the translation was no translation at all. It certainly bears no close resemblance to the original Greek. Bentley, the famous classical scholar, remarked to the chagrined author, “A pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.” The line of Pope has none of the great lift of the Homeric line, but it is often vigorous and picturesque, and answers with fair facility to the demands he makes upon it.
The troops exulting sat in order round,
And beaming fires illumined all the ground.
As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,
O’er heaven’s pure azure spreads her sacred light,
When not a breath disturbs the deep serene,
And not a cloud o’ercasts the solemn scene,
Around her throne the vivid planets roll,
And stars unnumber’d gild the glowing pole,
O’er the dark trees a yellower verdure shed,
And tip with silver every mountain’s head:
Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise,
A flood of glory bursts from all the skies;
The conscious swains, rejoicing in the sight,
Eye the blue vault, and bless the useful light.
In 1712, in a volume of Lintot’s Miscellanies, appeared The Rape of the Lock, one of the most brilliant poems in the language. The occasion of it was trivial enough. A Lord Petre had offended a Miss Fermor by cutting off a lock of her hair; dissensions between the families had followed, and Pope set about to laugh both parties back into good-humor. He makes of the incident a mock-heroic poem, and, rather unwisely, invents elaborate machinery of sylphs, gnomes, and other airy beings that take part in the mortals’ misdemeanors. The length becomes disproportionate to the theme, but the effect is quite dazzling. The style is highly artificial and mannered; but we must remember that Pope is jocular all through, and that he is purposely pitching his style as high as the subject permits. It abounds in rhetorical devices, such as climax, antithesis, and apostrophe. The effect produced is like that of a crackle of colored fireworks; smart epigrams explode in almost every line, and conceits dazzle with their brilliance. Yet so great an artist is Pope that by sheer skill he prevents the work from being flashy or vulgar: the workmanship is too delicate and precise.
But when to mischief mortals bend their will,
How soon they find fit instruments of ill!
Just then, Clarissa drew, with tempting grace,
A two-edged weapon from her shining case;
So ladies, in romance, assist their knight,
Present the spear, and arm him for the fight.
He takes the gift with reverence, and extends
The little engine on his fingers’ ends;
This just behind Belinda’s neck he spread,
As o’er the fragrant steams she bent her head.
Swift to the lock a thousand sprites repair,
A thousand wings, by turns, blow back the hair!
And thrice they twitched the diamond in her ear;
Thrice she looked back, and thrice the foe drew near.
Just in that instant, anxious Ariel sought
The close recesses of the virgin’s thought:
As on the nosegay in her breast reclined,
He watched the ideas rising in her mind,
Sudden he viewed, in spite of all her art,
An earthly lover lurking at her heart.
Amazed, confused, he found his power expired,
Resigned to fate, and with a sigh retired.
The peer now spreads the glittering forfex wide
To enclose the lock; now joins it, to divide.
E’en then, before the fatal engine closed,
A wretched sylph too fondly interposed;
Fate urged the shears, and cut the sylph in twain
(But airy substance soon unites again),
The meeting points the sacred hair dissever
From the fair head, for ever, and for ever!
The Dunciad appeared in 1728, with many subterfuges to conceal the authorship, and it reappeared in a larger, though not in an improved form, in 1742. In this poem he turns to rend the host of minor writers who had been making his life a misery with their pin-pricks. It shows his satirical powers at their best and at their worst. It is charged with a stinging wit, but is too spiteful and venomous, and confounds the good with the bad. Yet here as elsewhere Pope has many fine passages. The conclusion is probably the noblest that he ever composed:
In vain, in vain—the all-composing hour
Resistless falls: the Muse obeys the Power.
She comes! She comes! The sable throne behold
Of Night primeval and of Chaos old!
Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying rainbows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires....
See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled,
Mountains of casuistry heaped o’er her head!...
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
In vain! They gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires....
Lo! thy dread empire, CHAOS! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,
And universal darkness buries all.
The last years of his life were occupied chiefly in the composition of poetical epistles and satires (1731–35). Some of these are of great power, and show Pope’s art at its best. The Epistle to Arbuthnot contains the famous satirical portrait of Addison, with whom Pope had quarreled:
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 even 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?
In this passage, though he does not perceive it, Pope is holding up a glass to his own method. Observe how he “damns with faint praise”; how he is “willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike.” Nearly the whole extract might be applied to its author.
The last considerable poem is the Essay on Man (1734), which owes much to the suggestions of Bolingbroke. At the beginning of the poem he says “The proper study of mankind is man,” and then proceeds with a long and confused treatment of man and his place in the universe. As a contribution to philosophy it is contemptible, but from it we can detach clusters of passages full of force and beauty. The verse has all its author’s care and lucidity. In some places, indeed, the style is cut to the very bone, as it is in the well-known line, “Man never is but always to be blessed.”
4. His Prose. As a writer of prose Pope is of secondary importance. His Letters, published under a cloud of devious tricks, clearly are written with an eye on the public. They are addressed chiefly to notable persons, such as Swift and Gay, and consist of pompous essays upon abstract subjects. Sometimes in other letters he forgets himself, and writes easily and brightly, especially when he is telling of his own experiences.
5. Summary. It is now useful to draw together the various features of the work of this important poet.
(a) Both in subject and in style his poems are limited. They take people of his own social class, and they deal with their common experiences and their common interests and aspirations. Pope rarely dips below the surface, and when he does so he is not at his best. With regard to his style, we have seen that it is almost wholly restricted to the heroic couplet, used in a narrative and didactic subject. He is almost devoid of the lyrical faculty, and the higher artistic emotions—“passion and apathy, and glory and shame”—are beyond his artistic grasp.
(b) Within these limits his work is powerful and effective. The wit is keen; the satire burns like acid; and his zeal is unshakable. In serious topics, as in the Essay on Man, he can give imperishable shape to popular opinions.
(c) His work is careful and almost fastidious, and thus confers an enormous benefit upon English poetry. He cured poetry of the haphazard methods of the earlier ages. With inspiration lacking, care was more than ever necessary, and in this Pope led the way. His verse reads so easily owing to the great care he took with it.
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
Essay on Criticism
(d) His meter is among the most discussed in our literature. Its merits and demerits are quite clear to view. Against it we can urge its artificiality, its lack of originality, and the vile creeping paralysis that it communicated to the other metrical forms. Yet in its favor we must recognize its strength, unbreakable and pliable, like a strong bow, its clearness, point, and artistic brevity, and its incomparable excellence in some forms of satire and narrative. It is unprofitable to compare it with blank verse and other forms. We must recognize it as in a class apart.