Lord Lansdowne was at the zenith of his career when he persuaded Pope to eulogise the Peace. A measure in itself wise had been made subservient to the personal interests of the unprincipled faction in power. These intriguers could not carry on the war without the commanding genius of Marlborough, nor allow a political opponent to perpetuate his ascendancy by a fresh series of victories. Certain that they would be driven from office unless they could huddle up a peace, they were guilty of a treacherous connivance with the enemy, and a flagrant breach of faith towards their allies. They were compelled to grant terms to France which were the boast of her minister, Torcy, and which Bolingbroke confessed were not what policy or our successes required.[8] A man of more enlightened views might have justly urged that hard conditions, offensive to the pride of a great nation, were less calculated to ensure a lengthened peace than lenient demands, which allowed the consolation of an honourable retreat. No such plea was put forth by Bolingbroke. He always retained the vulgar idea that France ought to have been "humbled" and her "power reduced for generations to come." He lamented the moderation of the treaty, and threw the blame upon the want of union among the allies, which was itself occasioned by the knowledge that he and his colleagues had determined to sacrifice all other interests to their own.[9] There was a risk that a treaty which was thought inadequate by its authors would rouse universal indignation, and prove as fatal to their power as the continuance of the war. The Peace became the political test of the hour, and every artifice of prose and verse was employed to appease public opinion.
Pope did not stop with applauding the Peace; he denounced the Revolution. He afterwards professed a lofty superiority to party prejudices; but there were obvious reasons which might induce him to lay aside his usual caution at this crisis. The war was directed against Louis XIV., the champion of Roman Catholicism, and the Pretender. A general belief prevailed that the Protestant succession could only be secured by reducing the French king to helplessness, and that a Peace, on the other hand, which saved him and the Harley administration from ruin, would be propitious to the cause of tories, papists, and Jacobites. "They fancied," says Bolingbroke, "that the Peace was the period at which their millenary year would begin."[10] A young and sanguine poet may well have shared a conviction in which both sides concurred,—the ministerialists by their hopes, and the opposition by their fears. No sooner was the treaty concluded than it became apparent that the hopes and fears were exaggerated. The ministry was torn to pieces by intestine divisions; its supporters—a heterogeneous body, who had been loosely held together by a common enmity—were rapidly throwing off their allegiance; the good will, which had been founded upon large and vague expectations, was converted into hostility under total disappointment; and the failing health of the Queen rendered it probable that the accession of a whig sovereign would shortly complete the discomfiture of the faction. After the conclusion of the Peace, says Bolingbroke, "we saw nothing but increase of mortification, and nearer approaches to ruin."[11]
Having been too precipitate in casting in his lot with the tories, Pope hastened to qualify his rashness by conciliating the whigs, and undertook to furnish the Prologue to Addison's Cato. This play was brought out April 14, 1713, at the request of the opposition, who intended it for a remonstrance against the arbitrary projects imputed to the ministry. The tragedy was hurried upon the stage towards the close of the dramatic season, lest the salutary lesson should come too late to save the threatened constitution.[12] Pope told Spence that the manuscript was submitted to him by Addison, that he thought the action not sufficiently theatrical, and that he recommended the author to forego its performance. Shortly afterwards Addison went to him and said, "that some particular friends, whom he could not disoblige, insisted on its being acted." He protested that he had no party purpose in the play, commissioned Pope to convey this assurance to Oxford and Bolingbroke, sent them the tragedy along with the message, and obtained their encouragement. When a year and a half had elapsed, and the House of Hanover had succeeded to the English throne, Addison published in Nov. 1714, a copy of verses to the Princess of Wales, in which he took credit for the patriotism and daring of his muse in sending forth the play with the express design of defeating the machinations of the government.[13]
And boldly rising for Britannia's laws,
Engaged great Cato in her country's cause.
Hurd, unwilling to condemn his hero, Addison, and accepting, without misgiving, the statement reported by Spence, exclaims, "How spotless must that man be, that, in passing through a court, had only contracted this slight stain, even in the opinion of so severe a censor and casuist as Mr. Pope."[14] But unless the conduct of Addison is misrepresented he must have been corrupt and contemptible. The party of which he was a prominent member urged the production of his play, at a momentous crisis, with a political object, and it would have been mean and treacherous to yield to their entreaties, and then privately assure the common enemy that nothing political was intended. The baseness would have been great indeed if, when the power passed over to the whigs, he triumphantly declared that he had pursued the very course he disavowed at the time, and thus endeavoured by a false boast to procure new credit and rewards. Either Addison was unscrupulous, or Pope fabricated the tale. Addison's version was published to the world: Pope's version was dropped into the ear of Spence. Addison made his claim when the circumstances were fresh, and when Pope, Bolingbroke, and Oxford were at hand to expose him: Pope told his story after the lapse of many years, when he had quarrelled with Addison, and the subject of his aspersions was in the grave. Addison has never been convicted of an untruthful word, or a dishonourable act: Pope's career was a labyrinth of deceit, and he abounded in audacious malignant inventions. These considerations are sufficient, but there is more direct evidence. "I have had lately," wrote Pope to Caryll, Feb. 1713, "the entertainment of reading Mr. Addison's tragedy of Cato. It drew tears from me in several parts of the fourth and fifth acts, where the beauty of virtue appears so charming, that I believe, if it comes upon the theatre, we shall enjoy that which Plato thought the greatest pleasure an exalted soul could be capable of, a view of virtue itself dressed in person, colour, and action. The emotion which the mind will feel from this character, and the sentiments of humanity which the distress of such a person as Cato will stir up in us, must necessarily fill an audience with so glorious a disposition and sovereign a love of virtue, that I question if any play has ever conduced so immediately to morals as this." Here is Pope prognosticating that Cato upon the stage will melt, delight, and animate the audience. He penned the words at the exact period when, according to his later assertion, he was admonishing Addison that the play was unsuited to the theatre, and he is self-convicted by the contradiction. One-half of his story was false, and renders the other half worthless.[15]
In the account which Pope gave to Caryll of the first night of Cato he said that "all the foolish industry possible had been used to make it a party play," and complained that "the prologue writer was clapped into a stanch whig, sore against his will, at almost every two lines."[16] He might be anxious to persuade his jacobite correspondent that he had not been abetting a whig manifesto, and might pretend that he was annoyed at the construction put upon the Prologue, but his verses were chiefly devoted to enforcing the political doctrine of the play, and he must deliberately have laid himself out to catch the applause of its friends. His management advanced his fortunes. Windsor Forest procured him the acquaintance and patronage of the tory leaders. Swift recommended the poem to Stella on March 9, 1713, and in November he was heard by Dr. Kennet "instructing a young nobleman that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope, a papist, who had begun a translation of Homer into English verse, for which he must have them all subscribe, 'for,' says he, 'the author shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for him.'"[17] The other magnates of the faction joined with Swift in befriending him. In those heated times a Roman Catholic who had won over one party to his interests, by proclaiming his jacobite bias in verse, would naturally have fallen under the ban of their opponents; but his standing sponsor for the whig play, and the relations he maintained with whig authors, kept the whigs from renouncing him. To his art in attracting notice to his poetry through his politics, and in combining the suffrages of embittered political antagonists, he owed the unexampled success of the Homer subscription, which secured his pecuniary independence. He had served both masters by turns, though in unequal degrees, and then unreasonably complained to Caryll that some people called him a whig, and others called him a tory.[18] He disclaimed being either. He talked of his abhorrence of party violence, and propounded his principles in dark unmeaning generalities from which nothing can be gathered, except that he wished to avoid being held responsible for any opinions whatever. He did not take up the position that a purely literary undertaking was independent of politics. The moment the tory cause declined he pleaded his neutrality, and seemed to imagine that he could claim the support of all parties on the ground that he adhered to none. The less wary patron who bespoke Windsor Forest had to suffer for his jacobite zeal. He was arrested on Sept. 21, 1715, and remained in the Tower till Feb. 8, 1717. Bolingbroke and Oxford were impeached, and the selfish bargain they had brought about by dishonourable means, that they might prolong their rule, annihilated their power for ever.
"A person," says Warton, "of no small rank has informed me, that Mr. Addison was inexpressibly chagrined at the noble conclusion of Windsor Forest, both as a politician and as a poet,—as a politician, because it so highly celebrated that treaty of peace which he deemed so pernicious to the liberties of Europe; and as a poet, because he was deeply conscious that his own Campaign, that gazette in rhyme, contained no strokes of such genuine and sublime poetry."[19] This is one of those plausible imputations which enemies propagate on the evidence of their own suspicions, and which therefore require to be substantiated by unexceptionable testimony. Warton had nothing better to adduce in support of the credibility of his informant than the irrelevant circumstance that he was "a person of no small rank." The description of the witness declares his incompetence. It is not pretended that the "person of no small rank" was intimate with Addison, or had any authentic means of ascertaining his sentiments, and they are certainly misrepresented by the assertion that he could not endure poetical panegyrics on a Peace he disapproved, for in the Spectator of Oct. 30, 1712, he wrote up Tickell's laudatory verses, and "hoped his poem would meet with such a reward from its patrons as so noble a performance deserved."[20] There is not a party word added to extenuate the praise; a tory might have endorsed the essay. Intolerance and "inexpressible chagrin" were not at any time characteristics of Addison.
Tickell's Prospect of Peace went through six editions, and to judge by the sale was more popular than Windsor Forest, which was published four months later. The greater success of the far inferior poem was doubtless owing to the eulogium in the Spectator. Pope joined in applauding Tickell's work. He said that it contained "several most poetical images, and fine pieces of painting," he specified certain "strokes of mastery," and he especially commended the versification.[21] His too liberal praise may have been influenced by the couplet in which Tickell exclaimed,
Like the young spreading laurel, Pope! thy name
Shoots up with strength and rises into fame.
Nearly the whole of the poem is in an equally dreary style, and this dull mediocrity was not attained without numerous imitations of ancient and modern authors. The insipidity did not exclude extravagance; for both poetry and patriotism were thought to be displayed by a nonsensical exaggeration of British beauty, valour, and power.