ADVERTISEMENT
The hint of the following piece was taken from Chaucer's House of Fame. The design is in a manner entirely altered, the descriptions and most of the particular thoughts my own: yet I could not suffer it to be printed without this acknowledgment,[1] or think a concealment of this nature the less unfair for being common. The reader who would compare this with Chaucer, may begin with his third Book of Fame, there being nothing in the two first books that answers to their title.[2] Whenever any hint is taken from him, the passage itself is set down in the marginal notes.[3]
Some modern critics, from a pretended refinement of taste, have declared themselves unable to relish allegorical poems.[4] It is not easy to penetrate into the meaning of this criticism; for if fable be allowed one of the chief beauties, or, as Aristotle calls it, the very soul of poetry, it is hard to comprehend how that fable should be the less valuable for having a moral. The ancients constantly made use of allegories. My Lord Bacon has composed an express treatise in proof of this, entitled, The Wisdom of the Ancients; where the reader may see several particular fictions exemplified and explained with great clearness, judgment, and learning. The incidents, indeed, by which the allegory is conveyed, must be varied according to the different genius or manners of different times; and they should never be spun too long, or too much clogged with trivial circumstances, or little particularities. We find an uncommon charm in truth, when it is conveyed by this sideway to our understanding: and it is observable, that even in the most ignorant ages this way of writing has found reception. Almost all the poems in the old Provençal had this turn; and from these it was that Petrarch took the idea of his poetry. We have his Trionfi in this kind; and Boccace pursued in the same track. Soon after, Chaucer introduced it here, whose Romaunt of the Rose, Court of Love, Flower and the Leaf, House of Fame, and some others of his writings, are masterpieces of this sort. In epic poetry, it is true, too nice and exact a pursuit of the allegory is justly esteemed a fault; and Chaucer had the discernment to avoid it in his Knight's Tale, which was an attempt towards an epic poem. Ariosto, with less judgment, gave entirely into it in his Orlando; which, though carried to an excess, had yet so much reputation in Italy, that Tasso (who reduced heroic poetry to the juster standard of the ancients) was forced to prefix to his work a scrupulous explanation of the allegory of it, to which the fable itself could scarce have directed his readers. Our countryman, Spenser, followed, whose poem is almost entirely allegorical, and imitates the manner of Ariosto rather than that of Tasso. Upon the whole, one may observe this sort of writing, however discontinued of late, was in all times, so far from being rejected by the best poets, that some of them have rather erred by insisting on it too closely, and carrying it too far; and that to infer from thence that the allegory itself is vicious, is a presumptuous contradiction to the judgment and practice of the greatest geniuses, both ancient and modern.—Pope.
Pope, as he tells Steele in their correspondence (Nov. 16, 1712), had written the Temple of Fame two years before, that is, when he was only twenty-two years old, an early time of life for so much learning and so much observation as that work exhibits. It has, as Steele warmly declared, a "thousand beauties." Every part is splendid; there is great luxuriance of ornaments; the original vision of Chaucer was never denied to be much improved; the allegory is very skilfully continued, the imagery is properly selected and learnedly displayed; yet with all this comprehension of excellence, as its scene is laid in remote ages, and its sentiments, if the concluding paragraph be excepted, have little relation to general manners or common life, it never obtained much notice, but is turned silently over and seldom quoted or mentioned with either praise or blame.—Johnson.
It was, to the Italians we owed anything that could be called poetry, from whom Chaucer, imitated by Pope in this vision, copied largely, as they are said to have done from the bards of Provence. But whatever Chaucer might copy from the Italians, yet the artful and entertaining plan of his Canterbury Tales was purely original and his own. This admirable piece, even exclusive of its poetry, is highly valuable, as it preserves to us the liveliest and exactest picture of the manners, customs, characters, and habits, of our forefathers, whom he has brought before our eyes acting as on a stage, suitably to their different orders and employments. With these portraits the driest antiquary must be delighted. By this plan, he has more judiciously connected these stories which the guests relate, than Boccace has done his novels, whom he has imitated, if not excelled, in the variety of the subjects of his tales. It is a common mistake, that Chaucer's excellence lay in his manner of treating light and ridiculous subjects; for whoever will attentively consider the noble poem of Palamon and Arcite, will be convinced that he equally excels in the pathetic and the sublime. The House of Fame, as being merely descriptive, is of an inferior rank to those in Chaucer of the narrative kind, and which paint life and manners. The design is improved and heightened by the masterly hand of Pope. It is not improbable that this subject was suggested to our author, not only by Dryden's translations of Chaucer, of which Pope was so fond, but likewise by that celebrated paper of Addison, in the Tatler, called the Table of Fame, to which the great worthies of antiquity are introduced, and seated according to their respective merits and characters, and which was published some years before this poem was written. The six persons Pope thought proper to select as worthy to be placed on the highest seats of honour are Homer, Virgil, Pindar, Horace, Aristotle, Tully. It is observable that our author has omitted the great dramatic poets of Greece. Sophocles and Euripides deserved certainly an honourable niche in the Temple of Fame, as much as Pindar and Horace. But the truth is it was not fashionable in Pope's time, nor among his acquaintance, attentively to study these poets. I own I have some particular reasons for thinking that he was not very conversant in this sort of composition, having no inclination to the drama. In a note on the third book of his Homer, where Helen points out to Priam the names and characters of the Grecian leaders from the walls of Troy, he observes, that several great poets have been engaged by the beauty of this passage to an imitation of it. But who are the poets he enumerates on this occasion? Only Statius and Tasso; the former of whom, in his seventh book, and the latter in his third, shows the forces and the commanders that invested the cities of Thebes and Jerusalem. Not a syllable is mentioned of that capital scene in the Phœnissæ of Euripides, from the hundred and twentieth to the two hundredth line, where the old man, standing with Antigone on the walls of Thebes, marks out to her the various figures, habits, armour, and qualifications of each different warrior, in the most lively and picturesque manner, as they appear in the camp beneath them. In conclusion, we may observe that Pope's alterations of Chaucer are introduced with judgment and art, and that these alterations are more in number, and more important in conduct, than any Dryden has made of the same author.
The Temple of Fame was communicated to Steele, who entertained a high opinion of its beauties, and who conveyed it to Addison. Pope had ornamented the poem with the machinery of guardian angels, which he afterwards omitted. He speaks of his work with a diffidence uncommon in a young poet, and which does him credit. "No errors," he says to Steele, "are so trivial but they deserve to be mended. I could point you to several; but it is my business to be informed of those faults I do not know, and as for those I do, not to talk of them but to correct them. You speak of that poem in a style I neither merit nor expect, but, I assure you, if you freely mark or dash out, I shall look upon your blots to be its greatest beauties,—I mean, if Mr. Addison and yourself should like it in the whole. I am afraid of nothing so much as to impose anything on the world which is unworthy its acceptance."—Warton.
Chaucer's poem contains great strokes of Gothic imagination, yet bordering often on the most ideal and capricious extravagance. Pope has imitated this piece with his usual elegance of diction and harmony of versification; but, in the mean time, he has not only misrepresented the story, but marred the character of the poem. He has endeavoured to correct its extravagancies by new refinements and additions of another cast; but he did not consider that extravagancies are essential to a poem of such a structure, and even constitute its beauties. An attempt to unite order and exactness of imagery with a subject formed on principles so professedly romantic and anomalous, is like giving Corinthian pillars to a Gothic palace. When I read Pope's elegant imitation of this piece, I think I am walking among the modern monuments unsuitably placed in Westminster Abbey.—T. Warton.
Little can be added to T. Warton's masterly appreciation of the characteristic merit of this poem. May I be just allowed to mention, that there is less harmony of versification in this poem, than in most of the preceding, particularly the Rape of the Lock, Elegy to an Unfortunate Lady, and, above all, the Epistle of Eloisa. The pause is too generally at the end of the line, and on the fourth and fifth syllable. Pope bids