One characteristic of the Pastorals has been universally allowed—the peculiar softness of the versification, which was considered by Pope to be an essential quality of this species of composition. He told Spence that he had scarce ever bestowed more labour in tuning his lines.[15] He must have had less facility when he was learning the art than when he was thoroughly practised in it; and since authors are apt to estimate the result by the amount of toil it has cost them, the greater pains he expended upon his early efforts may have been the reason that "he esteemed the Pastorals as the most correct in the versification, and musical in the numbers, of all his works." He certainly went forwards in some of his later pieces. Windsor Forest, and the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, are finer specimens of melody than the Pastorals. The poetic harmony displayed by Pope in his youth refuted an axiom which Dryden propounded in his lines to the memory of Oldham.
O early ripe! to thy abundant store
What could advancing age have added more?
It might, what nature never gives the young,
Have taught the smoothness of thy native tongue.
But satire needs not this, and wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.
Many examples might be quoted in support of Dryden's position, but he had failed to discover, what the later history of poetry has rendered clear, that where there is not a defective ear, the softness or ruggedness of juvenile verses depends upon the model. The imitative faculty of boyhood is never more at home than in catching the trick of metrical harmony. Dryden had used the heroic measure with consummate skill, and no one who came after him could fall into the "harsh cadence" of Oldham's Satires, and Cowley's Davideis, or rest satisfied with the combination of rough and smooth in the productions of Sandys and Denham. The music of the "mighty master" was on every tongue when Pope began "to lisp in numbers." "I learned versification," he said to Spence, "wholly from Dryden's works, who had improved it much beyond any of our former poets; and would, probably, have brought it to its perfection, had not he been unhappily obliged to write so often in haste."[16] What Dryden did for Pope, Pope did for the next generation, and to compose mellifluous verses became the common attainment of ordinary scribblers. Cowper, in his Table Talk, has specially noticed this effect of Pope's writings.
But he (his musical finesse was such,
So nice his ear, so delicate his touch)
Made poetry a mere mechanic art,
And every warbler has his tune by heart.
In metrical skill Pope was thought by most persons to have surpassed all his predecessors. "He is the most harmonious poet," said Voltaire, "that England ever had. He has reduced the sharp hissings of the English trumpet to the sweet sounds of the flute."[17] Voltaire doubtless found this opinion prevalent in the circle he frequented during his residence in England, from 1720 to 1728; for his own knowledge of our language would not have enabled him to distinguish the nicer shades of melody. The English critics confirm his decision. Johnson declared that the versification of the Pastorals had "no precedent, nor has since had an imitation." Warton pronounced "that it was musical to a degree of which rhyme could hardly be thought capable," and Bowles admitted that Pope "had made the English couplet infinitely more smooth." To the few who "censured his poetry as too uniformly musical, and as glutting the ear with unvaried sweetness," Johnson replied, "I suspect this objection to be the cant of those who judge by principles rather than perception; and who would even themselves have less pleasure in his works, if he had tried to relieve attention by studied discords, or affected to break his lines, and vary his pauses."[18] Bowles sided with the cavillers, as Johnson deemed them, and held that the want of breaks and of variety in the pauses produced a monotony of sound. Lord Kames, on the contrary, asserted that Pope was "eminent for variety of versification," and that the variety of his pauses was the source of the "variety of his melody."[19] I agree with the dissentients who think that his metre is prone to a cloying mannerism, but I believe that the defect is ascribed by Bowles to the wrong cause. Any one who compares the imperial march of the metre in the Vanity of Human Wishes, with the sweet, but less majestic Deserted Village, will perceive that the swell of the heroic measure is capable of wide degrees. A poet judges of the harmony of his verses by trying them on his ear, and the tendency is to set them all to the same tune. This was Pope's error. He has in general, though not always, intermixed the pauses, but he has not varied sufficiently the swell and movement of his lines. Dryden, "in whose admirable ear," as Gray remarks, "the music of our old versification still sounded,"[20] rings the changes with wonderful ease and spirit, and is by turns soft and stately, lively and solemn, familiar and sonorous, while he preserves through all his transitions a freedom, a flow, and an elasticity which never flag. His negligent lines, which are often imputed to haste, have been thought by good writers to be intended to avoid the surfeit of an equable strain. "Sometimes," says Dr. Trapp, "it is not only allowable, but beautiful, to run into harsh and unequal numbers. Mr. Dryden himself does it; and we may be sure he knew when he did it as well as we could tell him. In a work intended for pleasure, variety justifies the breach of almost any rule, provided it be done but rarely."[21] There is extreme exaggeration in the language of Bowles when he states that Pope "gave the first idea of mellifluence." Lines as melodious may be counted in Dryden by the hundred. Pope only maintained a more continuous softness, or, as Johnson puts it, "he discovered, by perusing the works of Dryden, the most perfect fabric of English verse, and habituated himself to that only which he found the best."[22] This constantly recurring note, however attractive in itself, must always appear a retrograde system, to those who appreciate the richer music of more diversified modulations. The sameness of Pope's metre was the reason that "every warbler had his tune by heart," and imitated it so readily. There was a complexity in the incessant rise and fall of Dryden's lines which mechanical verse-makers could only copy imperfectly. The uniformity of Pope gave them little trouble. The repetition soon fixed the brief lesson in their minds, and the petty warblers almost rivalled their original in sound, though they were far enough from approaching the beauty of his language, the terseness of his style, the felicity of his ideas, and the weight of his sense.
As the Pastorals of Philips opened the sixth volume of Tonson's Miscellany, De Quiucey conjectures that Pope's Pastorals may have been placed at the end of the volume by his own desire. Both sets of verses, by this arrangement, were more likely to attract attention, and invite comparison. Pope appears not to have felt any jealousy at the outset. Speaking of Philips's Pastorals in a letter to Cromwell, on October 28, 1710, a year and a half after the Miscellany was published, he said "he agreed with the Tatler that we had no better eclogues in our language." He particularly commended the lines which describe the musician playing on the harp, and added that "nothing could be objected to them, except that they were too lofty for pastoral." He changed his tone after the essays on pastoral poetry had appeared in the Guardian. These papers commenced with No. 22, and in No. 23, for April 7, 1713, some passages are quoted from Philips to illustrate the qualities appropriate to the pastoral style. In No. 30 there are more quotations from Philips to the same purpose, and he and Spenser are singled out as the sole cultivators of this species of composition, who "have copied and improved the beauties of the ancients." The eulogium reached its climax in No. 32, where it is asserted that there have been only four true masters of the art in above two thousand years,—"Theocritus, who left his dominions to Virgil; Virgil, who left his to his son Spenser; and Spenser, who was succeeded by his eldest born Philips." It is not known who contributed the essays, but it has been conjectured, without any evidence, that they proceeded from Tickell. There cannot be a question that the author had a friendship for Philips, or he would not have ranked him with Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser; and it is equally certain that he was not an admirer of the Pastorals of Pope, which are passed over in silence, and which violate the canons laid down by the critic. "I must observe," he says, "that our countrymen have so good an opinion of the ancients, and think so modestly of themselves, that the generality of pastoral writers have either stolen all from the Greeks and Romans, or so servilely imitated their manners and customs as makes them very ridiculous."[23] The method of Philips is adduced in advantageous contrast. He is commended for changing the details with the scene, and introducing English ideas into English eclogues. A few months earlier similar praise had been bestowed upon him by Addison, in the Spectator for October 30, 1712. "When we are at school," said Addison in his essay, "it is necessary for us to be acquainted with the system of pagan theology, and we may be allowed to enliven a theme or point an epigram with a heathen god; but no thought is beautiful which is not just, and no thought can be just which is not founded in truth, or at least in that which passes for such. If any are of opinion that there is a necessity of admitting these classical legends into our serious compositions, in order to give them a more poetical turn, I would recommend to their consideration the Pastorals of Mr. Philips. One would have thought it impossible for this kind of poetry to have subsisted without fauns and satyrs, wood-nymphs and water-nymphs, with all the tribe of rural deities. But we see he has given a new life, and a more natural beauty, to this way of writing, by substituting in the place of these antiquated fables the superstitious mythology which prevails among the shepherds of our own country." Addison had previously commenced the reformation by excluding pagan machinery from his Campaign. It needed but a small amount of taste to share his opinions, and the writer in the Guardian can hardly be charged with hostility to Pope for not commending Pastorals which, apart from their melodious language, were little better than a medley of unnatural compliments, and unmeaning mythology. Contemporary criticism is more often corrupted by the kindness of friendship than by the spite of enmity, but the effect is sometimes the same, and the undue exaltation of Philips increased the comparative contempt which was cast upon Pope. He had reason to be annoyed, and it was not much compensation that the prettiest lines of his January and May were quoted in one of the papers on Pastoral, to show that fairies could be rendered attractive in verse.
The scheme Pope devised for redressing the wrong, was to send a paper to the Guardian in which he ridiculed the Pastorals of his rival and applauded his own. "With an unexampled and unequalled artifice of irony," says Dr. Johnson, "though he himself has always the advantage, he gives the preference to Philips." In the opening sentence of the essay Pope is described as "a gentleman whose character it is, that he takes the greatest care of his works before they are published, and the least concern for them afterwards."[24] He followed his invariable habit of boasting his pre-eminence in the very virtue he was defying, and attached this vaunt to a criticism in which his morbid "concern" for his works had induced him to become his own reviewer and eulogist. He was liberal in his self-laudation, and assured the public that though his Pastorals might not fulfil the strict definition laid down in the Guardian, they were, like Virgil's, "something better." To prove the inferiority of Philips he selected three of his worst passages, and contrasted them with three of his own. He picked out a dozen foolish lines from his rival, and alleged that they were specimens of his ordinary manner. He subjoined some ludicrous imitations of his style, which are only not an outrageous caricature because they have no resemblance at all to the original. The faults of Philips did not require to be exaggerated. The absurdities of his satirist are different in kind, but they are not less in degree. Some defects they had in common, and as self-love is blind, Pope did not perceive that most of his comments recoiled upon himself. He objected that Philips had introduced wolves into England, where they formerly existed, and the critic forgot that the imaginary golden age, which he maintained in his Discourse was the only era of Pastoral, must be assigned to a period long anterior to their extirpation. Or if the piping shepherds, who composed and chanted poems, were to be considered as existing personages, credibility was not more violated in supposing that Windsor Forest was still haunted by wolves than by heathen gods and goddesses,—in imagining the lambs to be preyed upon by a wild beast, than in picturing Christian bards employed in sacrificing them to Mrs. Tempest with an exact observance of pagan rites. He took especial credit for having kept to the circumstances proper to a particular season of the year, and a certain time of the day, and exposed the ignorance of Philips, who, says he, "by a poetical creation, hath raised up finer beds of flowers than the most industrious gardener; his roses, lilies, and daffodils blow in the same season." Pope might have remembered that in his own Pastorals he had made roses, violets, and crocuses bloom together, which drew from George Steevens the remark, that he has rarely mentioned flowers without some mistake of the kind. The nicest observers of nature are not exempt from these oversights. The swine in Ivanhoe feed on acorns under the trees in the middle of summer, and though Walter Scott, at the end of the Monastery, alluded playfully to the anachronism, he never cared to correct the error. A more important charge, in which Pope is most of all open to retaliation, was that Philip's Pastorals "gave manifest proof of his knowledge of books." While it was admitted that "his competitor had imitated some single thoughts of the ancients," Philips was held up as a wholesale depredator. He does, indeed, abound in the stock ideas which had served a hundred versifiers. He is a warbler who whistles an old tune, but he is not without a few notes which have a semblance of originality, and these are wanting in his accuser. Inferior to the Pastorals of Pope in polish and versification, the Pastorals of Philips are, on the whole, superior in their substance. The trial of skill between the musician and the nightingale, which forms the subject of the fifth Pastoral, is narrated with singular sweetness, and may still be read with pleasure. In true poetic feeling it is much beyond anything in the Pastorals of his scoffing critic. Philips owed his advantage to his maturer years, and not to the brilliancy of his talents; he was thirty-four when Tonson's Miscellany appeared, and Pope was but twenty-one. The powers of Philips remained stationary, and he ranks low among the minor poets. Pope quickly ripened into genius, and reigned without a competitor. The exaggerated panegyrics of the Guardian could not confer a reputation upon Philips he did not deserve, and Pope derived none of his celebrity from the gross expedient of exalting himself, and decrying his antagonist. There is nothing which is less affected by unjust praise and unjust detraction than an author's works. They are there to speak for themselves, and no amount of petty artifices can long raise them higher or sink them lower than they merit.
Pope was a contributor to the Guardian, and on cordial terms with the editor, but he could not ask to have a paper inserted in which he had drawn a comparison between his own Pastorals and those of his rival, and awarded himself the palm. He therefore sent the criticism anonymously, and Steele, as we are told by Warburton, not discovering that the praise of Philips and the censure of Pope were both ironical, showed the manuscript to the latter, and assured him that he would "never publish any paper where one of the club was complimented at the expense of another." His ingenuous ally affected magnanimity, and prevailed upon Steele to print the essay. The irony which could not be detected by the wits at Button's might well escape less cultivated minds. Ayre, in his Memoirs of Pope, in 1745, and Dilworth, in 1760, both believed that the criticism was to be interpreted literally, that Steele was the author of it, and that it was dictated by friendship for Philips. Small as was the ability of these biographers, they may be supposed to have shared the common opinion. This continued to be the accepted doctrine in the next generation; and the celebrated circle in which Hannah More lived were unanimous in holding that the essay was not satirical. "The whole criticism," she wrote August 4, 1783, "appears to me a burlesque, but I have some reason to think I am in the wrong, as I have all the world against me. That a writer of so pure a taste could be in earnest when he talks of the elegance of Diggon Davy, and exalts all that trash of Philips's, whose simplicity is silliness, I cannot bring myself to believe." She found it still more difficult to believe that the author could be serious in asserting that Hobbinol and Lobbin are names agreeable to the delicacy of an English ear.[25] Hannah More judged of Philips by the wretched extracts in the Guardian. Her accomplished friends could hardly have admired them; and it must have been for a different reason that the purpose of the essay was misunderstood. Warton says that the misapprehension arose from "the skill with which the irony was conducted." It would be more natural to infer that the execution was defective when the vast majority of literary men mistook the design. The satire, in fact, is imperfectly sustained, and passages, which the author intended for irony, appeared to the reader to be plain common sense. "Mr. Pope," he says of himself, "hath fallen into the same error with Virgil. His names are borrowed from Theocritus and Virgil, which are improper to the scenes of his Pastorals. He introduces Daphnis, Alexis, and Thyrsis on British plains, as Virgil had done before him on the Mantuan." Habit had reconciled Pope to the affectation of calling English shepherds Daphnis and Thyrsis, but "the names," as De Quincey says, "are rank with childishness," and the public, who felt the practice to be absurd, concluded that the censure was real. "It may," said Pope, "be observed, as a farther beauty of this pastoral, that the words nymph, dryad, naiad, faun, Cupid, or satyr, are not once mentioned through the whole," which was a sneer at Addison's commendation of Philips for rejecting those dreary nonentities; but the public, who had been nauseated with them, could not detect a covert sarcasm in the repetition of the praise by the writer in the Guardian. The circumstance which seemed to Warton to render the irony transparent was the remark, that "Philips had with great judgment described wolves in England," but the ridicule was based upon ignorance, and must have been lost upon every one who was aware that wolves abounded in the antique period to which the pastorals referred. Bowles, who knew that the paper was ironical, yet imagined that Pope was serious in the opening portion, where it is asserted that Virgil has not above a couple of "true pastorals," and that Theocritus has scarcely more. This part, however, of the essay was in the same sarcastic vein with the rest. The previous critic in the Guardian had laid down the rule that a pastoral should reflect "the golden age of innocence," and Pope, to deprive Philips of the benefit of the definition, endeavoured to show that Theocritus and Virgil had hardly ever conformed to it. He did not mean seriously to admit that his competitor was a more genuine pastoral poet than Virgil and Theocritus. His object was to throw ridicule on the definition itself, albeit he adopted it in his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry when he was no longer engaged in disparaging Philips.
Nothing can be clearer than that Pope was instigated to write the essay in the Guardian by his jealousy of the praise which had been bestowed upon his rival. The course he took was discreditable, and Warburton, without attempting a direct apology, pretends that the incident which influenced the poet was the misrepresentations made of him to Addison by Philips. Ruffhead adds that the calumny consisted in the assertion that Pope was "engaged in the intrigues of the tory ministry." This would be a good reason for his exposing the mis-statement, but would be a poor excuse for his writing an anonymous attack upon Philips's Pastorals, and a panegyric upon his own. The defence, which would be inadequate if it was true, is indubitably incorrect. The account of Warburton did not appear till Philips was dead. Pope, while Philips was living, published an account, in the shape of a letter to Caryll, the date and contents of which prove that Philips did not bring his charge against Pope till a full year after the paper had been printed in the Guardian.[26] The poet adds that when they meet he will inform Caryll "of the secret grounds of Philips's malignity," and Warburton himself subjoins in a note "These grounds were Mr. Pope's writing the ironical comparison between his own and Philips's Pastorals." The strong presumption from the nature of the case that Pope was actuated by literary envy is thus confirmed. The criticism in the Guardian was not provoked by the malignity of Philips, but the bitterness of Philips was the consequence of the criticism. In 1790, Mr. J. C. Walker, the Italian scholar, sent to the Gentleman's Magazine an alleged remark of Philips to the same effect. "When the comparison," says Mr. Walker, "between the Pastorals of Pope and Philips appeared, Philips was secretary to Primate Boulter, and then in Ireland. Dining one day with the officers of the Prerogative Court, the comparison became the subject of conversation, and Philips said he knew it was written by Pope, adding, 'I wonder why the little crooked bastard should attack me, who never offended him either in word or deed?' This I had from a gentleman who was present."[27] If the conversation ever occurred, the gentleman was mistaken in supposing that the criticism was recent, for the paper in the Guardian came out in 1713, and it was not till more than ten years afterwards that Philips went with Archbishop Boulter to Ireland. The story is unnecessary to prove that Pope was the aggressor, which is sufficiently evident from independent testimony. Unhappily for himself, he began at the outset of his career to stir up those enmities which were the torment of his existence. By his attack upon Dennis, in the Essay on Criticism, he invited the scurrility of that rabid pamphleteer, and by what Bowles calls his "unmanly hostility" to Philips he was reduced to the shame of being scared away from Button's by the no less unmanly retaliation of his victim, who, at some period of the quarrel, hung up a birch, and declared that he would use it on "his rival Arcadian," if he showed his face in the coffee-room.