Indeed, throughout The Seasons Thomson's indebtedness to his corrector is incalculable; many of the most felicitous touches are due to him. Now, who was this corrector? Let Mr. Tovey answer. "It has long been accepted as a fact among scholars that Pope assisted Thomson in the composition of The Seasons. Our original authority is, we suppose, Warton." The truth is that our original authority for this statement is neither Warton nor any other writer of the eighteenth century, but simply the conjecture of Mitford—in other words, Mitford's mere assumption that the handwriting of the corrector is the handwriting of Pope; and, if we are not mistaken,—for Mitford may have given earlier currency to it in some other place—the conjecture appeared for the first time in Mitford's edition of Gray, published in 1814. In his copy of the volume, containing the MS. notes, he bolsters up his statement by two assertions and references: "That Pope saw some pieces of Thomson's in manuscript is clear from a letter in Bowles's Supplement, page 194" (an obvious misprint for 294). But on turning to the references all that we find is—it is in a letter dated February 1738/9—"I have yet seen but three acts of Mr. Thomson's, but I am told, and believe by what I have seen that it excels in the pathetic"; the reference is plainly to Thomson's tragedy, Edward and Eleonora. Again, Mitford writes: "On Thomson's submitting his poems to Pope" (see Warton's edition, vol. viii., page 340), and again we get no proof. All that Pope says is, "I am just taken up"—he is writing to Aaron Hill under date November 1732—"by Mr. Thomson in the perusal of a new poem he has brought me;" this new poem being almost certainly Liberty, in the composition of which Thomson was then engaged. So far from the tradition having any countenance from Warton, it is as certain as anything can be, that Warton knew nothing about it. In his Essay on Pope he gives an elaborate account of The Seasons, and he has more than once referred to Pope and Thomson together; but he says not a word, either in this Essay or in his edition of Pope's Works, about Pope having corrected Thomson's poetry. If Pope assisted Thomson, to the extent indicated in these corrections, such an incident, considering the fame of Thomson and the fame of Pope, must have been known to some at least of the innumerable editors, biographers, and anecdotists between 1742 and 1814. It could hardly have escaped being recorded by Murdoch, Mallet, or Warburton, by Ruffhead, by Savage or Spence, by Theophilus Cibber or Johnson. It is incredible that such an interesting secret should have been kept either by Thomson himself or by Pope. Again, whoever the corrector was, he had a fine ear for blank verse, and must indeed have been a master of it. There is no proof that Pope ever wrote in blank verse; indeed, we have the express testimony of Lady Wortley Montagu that he never attempted it, and his Shakespeare conclusively proves that he had anything but a nice ear for its rhythm. With all this collateral evidence against the probability of the corrector being Pope, we come to the evidence which should settle the question, the evidence of handwriting. There is no lack of material for forming an opinion on this point. Pope's autograph MSS. are abundant, illustrating his hand at every period in his life. It is amazing to find Mitford asserting that his friends Ellis and Combe, at the British Museum, had no doubt about the hand of the corrector being the hand of Pope. Mr. Tovey candidly admits that, "if the best authorities at the Museum many years ago were positive that the handwriting was Pope's, their successors at the present time are equally positive that it is not." Such is the very decided opinion of Mr. Warner; such, also, as Mr. Tovey acknowledges, is the opinion of Professor Courthope, and such, we venture to think, will be the opinion of every one who will take the trouble to compare the hands. Mr. Tovey himself is plainly very uneasy, and indeed goes so far as to say that "it has all along been perplexing to me how the opinion that this was Pope's handwriting could ever have been confidently" (the italics are his) "entertained"; and yet in his notes he follows Bell, and inserts these corrections with Pope's initials.
We search in vain among those who are known to have been on friendly terms with Thomson for a probable claimant. It could not, as his other stupid revisions of Thomson's verses sufficiently show, have been Lyttleton. Mallet's blank verse is conclusive against his having had any hand in the corrections. Collins and Hammond are out of the question. It is just possible, though hardly likely, that the corrector was Armstrong. He was on very intimate terms with Thomson. His own poem proves that he could sometimes write excellent blank verse, but the touch and rhythm of the corrections are, it must be admitted, not the touch and rhythm of Armstrong.
What has long, therefore, been represented and circulated as an undisputed fact—namely, that Pope assisted Thomson in the revision of The Seasons—rests not, as all Thomson's modern editors have supposed, on the traditions of the eighteenth century, and on the testimony of authenticated handwriting, but on a mere assumption of Mitford. That the volume in question really belonged to Thomson, and that the corrections are originals, hardly admits of doubt, though Mitford gives neither the pedigree nor the history of this most interesting literary relic. It is, of course, possible that the corrections are Thomson's own, and that the differences in the handwriting are attributable to the fact that in some cases he was his own scribe, that in others he employed an amanuensis; but the intrinsic unlikeness of the corrections, made in the strange hand, to his characteristic style renders this improbable. In any case there is nothing to warrant the assumption that the corrector was Pope.
CATULLUS AND LESBIA. [47]
[47] The Lesbia of Catullus. Arranged and translated by J. H. A. Tremenheere. London.
Perhaps the best thing in this world is youth, and the poetry of Catullus is its very incarnation. The "young Catullus" he was to his contemporaries, and the young Catullus he will be to the end of time. To turn over his pages is to recall the days when all within and all without conspire to make existence a perpetual feast, when life's lord is pleasure, its end enjoyment, its law impulse, before experience and satiety have disillusioned and disgusted, and we are still in Dante's phrase, "trattando l'ombre come cosa salda." And the poet of youth had the good fortune not to survive youth; of the dregs and lees of the life he chose he had no taste. While the cup which "but sparkles near the brim" was still sparkling for him, death dashed it from his lips. At thirty his tale was told,—and a radiant figure, a sunny memory and a golden volume were immortal.
Revelling alike in the world of nature, and in the world of man, at once simple and intense, at once playful and pathetic, his poetry has a freshness as of the morning, an abandon as of a child at play. He has not, indeed, escaped the taint of Alexandrinism any more than Burns escaped the taint of the pseudo-classicism of the conventional school of his day, but this is the only note of falsetto discernible in what he has left us. It is when we compare him with Horace, Propertius, and Martial that his incomparable charm is most felt. As a lyric poet, except when patriotic, and when dealing with moral ideas, Horace is as commonplace as he is insincere; he had no passion; he had little pathos; he had not much sentiment; he had no real feeling for nature, he was little more than a consummate craftsman, to adopt an expression from Scaliger "ex alienis ingeniis poeta, ex suo tantum versificator." In his Greek models he found not merely his form, but his inspiration. Most of his love odes have all the appearance of being mere studies in fancy. When he attempts threnody he is as frigid as Cowley. Whose heart was ever touched by the verses to Virgil on the death of Quintilian, or by the verses to Valgius on the death of his son? The real Horace is the Horace of the Satires and Epistles, and the real Horace had as little of the temperament of a poet as La Fontaine and Prior. Propertius had passion, and he had certainly some feeling for nature, but he was an incurable pedant both in temper and in habit. Martial applied the epigram, in elegiacs and in hendecasyllabics, to the same purposes to which it was applied by Catullus, with more brilliance and finish, but he had not the power of informing trifles with emotion and soul. What became with Catullus the spontaneous expression of the dominant mood, became in the hands of Martial the mere tour de force of the ingenious wit. Catullus is the most Greek of all the Roman poets; Greek in the simplicity, chastity and propriety of his style, in his exquisite responsiveness to all that appeals to the senses and the emotions, in his ardent and abounding vitality. But, in his enthusiasm for nature, in the intensity of his domestic affections, and in his occasional touches of moral earnestness—and we have seldom to go far for them—he was Roman. His sketches from nature are delightful. What could be more perfect than the following? Has even Tennyson equalled it?—
Hic, qualis flatu placidum mare matutino