statement being communicated to a relative of the poet, the brutal fellow, who was probably without a tincture of polite learning, said he heard of the relationship for the first time! ‘Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure,’ sang one of Pope’s too numerous enemies in the easy numbers he had taught his age. It is, however, now taken as settled that the elder Pope, like Izaak Walton and John Gilpin, and many other good fellows, was a linen-draper. He made money, and one would like to know how he did it in the troublesome times he lived in; but his books have all perished. He was a Roman Catholic, as also was the poet’s mother, who was her husband’s second wife, and came out of Yorkshire. It used to be confidently asserted that the elder Pope, on retiring from business, which he did early in the poet’s childhood, put his fortune in a box and spent it as he needed it,—a course of conduct the real merits of which are likely to be hid from a lineal descendant. Old Pope, however, did nothing of the kind, but invested money in the French funds, his conscience not allowing him to do so in the English, and he also lent sums on bond to fellow-Catholics, one of whom used to remit him his half-year’s interest calculated at
the rate of £4 per cent. per annum, whereas by the terms of the bond he was to pay £4¼ per cent. per annum. On another occasion the same borrower deducted from the interest accrued due a pound he said he had lent the youthful poet. These things annoyed the old gentleman, as they would most old gentlemen of my acquaintance. The poet was the only child of his mother, and a queerly constituted mortal he was. Dr. Johnson has recorded the long list of his infirmities with an almost chilling bluntness; but, alas! so malformed was Pope’s character, so tortuous and twisted were his ways, so elaborately artificial and detestably petty many of his devices, that it is not malice, but charity, that bids us remember that, during his whole maturity, he could neither dress nor undress himself, go to bed or get up without help, and that on rising he had to be invested with a stiff canvas bodice and tightly laced, and have put on him a fur doublet and numerous stockings to keep off the cold and fill out his shrunken form. If ever there was a man whose life was one long provocation, that man was the author of the Dunciad. Pope had no means of self-defence save his wit. Dr. Johnson was a queer fellow enough, having inherited, as he
tells us, a vile melancholy from his father, and he certainly was no Adonis to look at, but those who laughed at him were careful to do so behind his gigantic back. When a rapacious bookseller insulted him he knocked him down. When the caricaturist Foote threatened to take him off upon the stage, the most Christian of lexicographers caused it to be intimated to him that if he did the author of Rasselas would thrash him in the public street, and the buffoon desisted. ‘Did not Foote,’ asked Boswell, ‘think of exhibiting you, sir?’ and our great moralist replied, ‘Sir, fear restrained him; he knew I would have broken his bones.’ When he denounced Macpherson for his Ossian frauds, and the irate Celt said something about personal chastisement, Johnson told him, in writing, that he was not to be deterred from detecting a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian, and by way of a temporary provision for his self-defence selected a most grievous cudgel, six feet in height, and terminating in a head (once the root) of the size of a large orange. The possession of great physical strength is no mean assistance to a straightforward life. The late Professor Fawcett, who, though blind, delighted, arm-in-arm with a friend, to skate furiously on the fens,
never could be brought to share the fears entertained on his behalf by some of the less stalwart of his acquaintances. ‘Why,’ he used to exclaim apologetically, ‘even if I do run up against anybody, it is always the other fellow who gets the worst of it.’ But poor Pope, whom a child could hustle, had no such resources. We should always remember this; it is brutal to forget it.
Pope’s parents found in their only son the vocation of their later life. He might be anything he liked. Did he lisp in numbers, the boyish rhymes were duly scanned and criticised; had he a turn for painting, lessons were provided. He might be anything he chose, and everything by turns. Many of us have been lately reading chapters from the life of another only son, and though the comparison may not bear working out, still, that there were points of strong similarity between the days of the youthful poet at Binfield and those of Ruskin at Herne Hill may be suspected. Pope’s education was, of course, private, for a double reason—his proscribed faith and his frail form. Mr. Leslie Stephen, with a touching faith in public schools, has the hardihood to regret that it was obviously impossible to send Pope to Westminster.
One shudders at the thought. It could only have ended in an inquest. As it was, the poor little cripple was whipped at Twyford for lampooning his master. Pope was extraordinarily sensitive. Cruelty to animals he abhorred. Every kind of sport, from spinning cockchafers to coursing hares, he held in loathing, and one cannot but be thankful that the childhood of this supersensitive poet was shielded from the ruffianism of the nether world of boys as that brood then existed. Westminster had not long to wait for Cowper. Pope was taught his rudiments by stray priests and at small seminaries, where, at all events, he had his bent, and escaped the contagious error that Homer wrote in Greek in order that English boys might be beaten. Of course he did not become a scholar. Had he done so he probably would not have translated Homer, though he might have lectured on how not to do it. Indeed, the only evidence we have that Pope knew Greek at all is that he translated Homer, and was accustomed to carry about with him a small pocket edition of the bard in the original. Latin he could probably read with decent comfort, though it is noticeable that if he had occasion to refer to a Latin book, and there was a
French translation, he preferred the latter version to the original. Voltaire, who knew Pope, asserts that he could not speak a word of French, and could hardly read it; but Voltaire was not a truthful man, and on one occasion told lies in an affidavit. The fact is, Pope’s curiosity was too inordinate—his desire to know everything all at once too strong—to admit of the delay of learning a foreign language; and he was consequently a reader of translations, and he lived in an age of translations. He was, as a boy, a simply ferocious reader, and was early acquainted with the contents of the great poets, both of antiquity and the modern world. His studies, at once intense, prolonged, and exciting, injured his feeble health, and made him the lifelong sufferer he was. It was a noble zeal, and arose from the immense interest Pope ever took in human things.
From 1700 to 1715, that is, from his fourteenth to his twenty-ninth year, he lived with his father and mother at Binfield, on the borders of Windsor Forest, which he made the subject of one of his early poems, against which it was alleged, with surely some force, that it has nothing distinctive about it, and might as easily have been written about any other forest; to
which, however, Dr. Johnson characteristically replied that the onus lay upon the critic of first proving that there is anything distinctive about Windsor Forest, which personally he doubted, one green field in the Doctor’s opinion being just like another. In 1715 Pope moved with his parents to Chiswick, where, in 1717, his father, aged seventy-five, died. The following year the poet again moved with his mother to the celebrated villa at Twickenham, where in 1733 she died, in her ninety-third year. Ten years later Pope’s long disease, his life, came to its appointed end. His poetical dates may be briefly summarized thus: his Pastorals, 1709; the Essay on Criticism, 1711; the first version of the Rape of the Lock, 1712; the second, 1714; the Iliad, begun in 1715, was finished 1720; Eloisa, 1717; the Elegy to the memory of an Unfortunate Lady and the Dunciad, 1728; the Essay on Man, 1732; and then the Epistles and Satires. Of all Pope’s biographers, Dr. Johnson is still, and will probably ever remain, the best. The Life, indeed, like the rest of the Lives of the Poets, is a lazy performance. It is not the strenuous work of a young author eager for fame. When Johnson sat down, at the instance of the London
booksellers, to write the lives of those poets whose works his employers thought it well to publish, he had long been an author at grass, and had no mind whatever again to wear the collar. He had great reading and an amazing memory, and those were at the service of the trade. The facts he knew, or which were brought to his door, he recorded, but research was not in his way. Was he not already endowed—with a pension, which, with his customary indifference to attack, he wished were twice as large, in order that his enemies might make twice as much fuss over it? None the less—nay, perhaps all the more—for being written with so little effort, the Lives of the Poets are delightful reading, and Pope’s is one of the very best of them. [59] None knew the infirmities of ordinary human nature better than Johnson. They neither angered him nor amused him; he neither storms, sneers, nor chuckles, as he records man’s vanity, insincerity, jealousy, and pretence. It is with a placid pen he pricks