Now, in the corresponding case (as Pope had arranged it) between England and France, the parallel certainly held good as far as the military conquest. England, it was undeniable, had conquered France in that sense, as completely as ever Rome had conquered Greece or Macedon. Two English kings had seated themselves in succession upon the throne of France—one virtually, one formally. So far all was tight, and held water. Nothing could disturb that part of the case. But next came the retaliatory conquest, by means of arts and letters. How was this to be dealt with? What shadow or dream of a correspondency could be made out there? What impudence could face that? Already, in Pope's ears, sounded the trumpet of recall; and Pope mused a, little: but 'No,' he said in effect, 'I will not turn back. Why should I? It is but one astounding falsehood that is wanted to set me free.' I will venture to say that Mendez Pinto, the Portuguese liar, that Sir John Mandeville, the traveller, that Baron Munchausen, the most philosophic of bold adventurers into the back settlements of lying, never soared into such an aerial bounce, never cleared such a rasper of a fence, as did Pope on this occasion. He boldly took it upon his honor and credit that our English armies, in the times of Agincourt and the Regent Bedford, found in France a real, full-grown French literature, packed it up in their baggage-wagons, and brought it home to England. The passage from Horace, part of which has been cited above, stands thus in the translation of Pope:—
'We conquered France, but felt our captive's charms—
Her arts victorious triumphed o'er our arms;
Britain to soft refinements less a foe,
Wit grew polite, and numbers learned to flow.'
Ten years then, before Joan of Arc's execution, [Footnote 11] viz., about 1420 (if we are to believe Pope), or even fifteen years, France had a great domestic literature; and this unknown literature has actually furnished a basis to our own. Let us understand clearly what it is that Pope means to assert. For it is no easy matter to do that where a man dodges behind texts and notes, and shuffles between verse and prose, mystifying the reader, and designing to do so. Under the torture of cross-examination let us force Pope to explain what literature that is which, having glorified France, became the venerable mother of a fine English literature in an early stage of the fifteenth century? The reader, perhaps, fancies that possibly Pope may have expressed himself erroneously only from being a little hurried or a little confused. Not at all. I know my man better, perhaps, than the reader does; and I know that he is trying to hoax us. He is not confused himself, but is bent upon confusing us; and I am bent upon preventing him. And, therefore, again I ask sternly, What literature is this which very early in the fifteenth century, as early as Agincourt, we English found prospering in France, and which, for the benefit of the English intellect, such men as Ancient Pistol, Nym, Bardolph, Fluellen, Capt. Macmorris, Jamy, and other well-known literati in the army of Henry V., transplanted (or, 'as the wise it call,' conveyed) to England? Agincourt was fought in 1415; exactly four centuries before Waterloo. That was the beginning of our domination in France; and soon after the middle of that same fifteenth century, viz., about 1452, our domination was at an end. During that interval, therefore, it must have been, then, or not at all, that this great intellectual revolution worked by France upon England was begun and completed. Naturally, at this point, the most submissive and sycophantish of Pope's friends would feel moved by the devil of curiosity, if not absolutely by the devil of suspicion, humbly to ask for a name or two, just as a specimen, from this great host of Anglo-Gallic wits. Pope felt (and groaned as he felt) that so reasonable a demand could not be evaded. 'This comes of telling lies,' must have been his bitter reflection: 'one lie makes a necessity for another.' However, he reflected that this second lie need not be introduced into the text, where it would have the fatal effect of blowing up the whole bubble: it might be hidden away in a foot-note. Not one person in twenty would read it, and he that did might easily suppose the note to be some unauthorized impertinence of a foolish commentator. Secretly therefore, silently, stealthily—so as to draw as little attention as possible—Pope introduced into a note his wicked little brazen solution of his own wicked and brazen conundrum. France, such was the proposition, had worked a miracle upon English ground; as if with some magician's rod, she had called up spawn innumerable of authors, lyric, epic, dramatic, pastoral, each after his kind. But by whom had France moved in this creation as the chief demi-urgus? By whom, Mr. Pope? Name, name, Mr. Pope! 'Ay,' we must suppose the unhappy man to reply, 'that's the very question which I was going to answer, if you wouldn't be so violent.' 'Well, answer it then. Take your own time, but answer; for we don't mean to be put off without some kind of answer.' 'Listen, then,' said Pope, 'and I'll whisper it into your ear; for it's a sort of secret.' Now think, reader, of a secret upon a matter like this, which (if true at all) must be known to the antipodes. However, let us have the secret. 'The secret,' replied Pope, 'is, that some time in the reign of Charles the Second—when I won't be positive, but I'm sure it was after the Restoration—three gentlemen wrote an eighteen-penny pamphlet.' 'Good! And what were the gentlemen's names?' 'One was Edmund Waller, the poet; one was Mr. Go-dolphin; and the other was Lord Dorset.' 'This trinity of wits, then, you say, Mr. Pope, produced a mountain, price eighteen-pence, and this mountain produced a mouse.' 'Oh, no! it was just the other way. They produced a mouse, price eighteen-pence, and this mouse produced a mountain, viz., the total English literature.' O day and night, but this is wondrous strange! The total English literature—not the tottle only, but the tottle of the whole, like an oak and the masts of some great amiral, that once slept in an acorn—absolutely lying hid in an eighteen-penny pamphlet! And what, now, might this pamphlet be about? Was it about the curing of bacon, or the sublimer art of sowing moonshine broadcast? It was, says Pope, if you must know everything, a translation from the French. And judiciously chosen; for it was the worst (and surely everybody must think it proper to keep back the best, until the English had earned a right to such luxuries by showing a proper sense of their value)—the worst it was, and by very much the worst, of all Corneille's dramas; and its name was 'Pompey.' Pompey, was it? And so, then, from Pompey's loins we, the whole armies of English litterateurs, grubs and eagles, are lineally descended. So says Pope. So he must say, In obedience to his own line of argument. And, this being the case, one would be glad to have a look at Pompey. It is hard upon us literati, that are the children of Pompey, not to have a look at the author of our existence. But our chance of such a look is small indeed. For Pompey, you are to understand, reader, never advanced so far as to a second edition. That was a poor return on the part of England for Pompey's services. And my too sceptical mind at one time inclined to doubt even Pompey's first edition; which was wrong, and could have occurred only to a lover of paradoxes. For Warton (not Tom, but Joe) had actually seen Pompey, and records his opinion of him, which happened to be this: that Pompey was 'pitiful enough.' These are Joe's own words. Still, I do not see that one witness establishes a fact of this magnitude. A shade of doubt, therefore, continues to linger over Pompey's very existence; and the upshot is, that Pompey (not the great, but confessedly) the doubtful, eighteen-penny Pompey, but, in any case, Pompey, 'the Pitiful,' is the Great overriding and tutelary power, under whose inspiration and inaugurating impulse our English literature has blossomed and ripened, root, stem, and branch, through the life-struggles of five centuries, into its present colossal proportions.
Here pause, reader, and look back upon the separate reticulations—so as, if possible, to connect them—in this network of hideous extravagance; where as elsewhere it happens, that one villany, hides another, and that the mere depth of the umbrage spread by fraudulent mystifications is the very cause which conceals the extent of those mystifications. Contemplated in a languid mood, or without original interest in the subject, that enormity of falsehood fails to strike, which, under circumstances personally interesting, would seem absolutely incredible. The outrage upon the intellect actually obscures and withdraws the outrage upon the facts. And, inversely, the affronts to historical accuracy obscure the affronts to good sense. Look steadily for a moment at the three points in the array of impeachments:—
I. In the Red-rose invasion of France, Pope assumes, as a matter of notoriety, that the English invading force went from a land of semi-barbarism to a land of literature and refinement: the simple fact being so conspicuously the other way, that, whilst France had no literature at all, consequently could have nothing to give (there being no book extensively diffused in the France of that period, except the 'De Imitatione Christi,') [Footnote 13] England, on the other hand, had so bright a jewel to offer, that to this hour the whole of Christendom has not matched it or approached it. Even at present, in the case so often supposed, that a man were marooned, that is, confined (as regarded his residence) to one desert island, and marooned also as to books, confined I mean (as regarded his reading) to one sole book, his choice (if he read English) would probably oscillate between Shakspeare and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Now, the Canterbury Tales had been finished about thirty-five years before Agincourt; so exquisitely false, even in this point, is Pope's account. Against the nothing of beggarly France was even then to be set a work which has not been rivalled, and probably will not be rivalled, on our planet.
II. In this comparison of the France and England then existing, historically Pope betrays an ignorance which is humiliating. He speaks of France as if that name, of course, covered the same states and provinces that it now covers. But take away from the France of this day the parts then possessed by Burgundy—take away Alsace, and Lorraine, and Franche Compte—take away the alien territories adjacent to Spain and Navarre—take away Avignon, &c.—take away the extensive duchy of Britanny, &c.—and what remains of that which constituted the France of Pope's day? But even that which did remain had no cohesion or unity as regarded any expanded sentiment of nationality, or the possibilities of a common literature. The moral anachronisms of Pope in this case are absolutely frightful—and the physical anachronisms of Pope also; for the simple want of roads, by intercepting all peaceful and pleasurable intercourse, must have intercepted all growth of nationality, unless when a rare community of selfish interest happened to arise, as when the whole was threatened with conquest or with famine through foreign aggression upon a part.
III. That particular section of the French literature through which, Pope pretends to think (for think he does not) that France absolutely created our own, was the drama. Eighteen-penny Pompey belongs to this section. Now, most unhappily, these two broad facts are emblazoned beyond all power of impudence to darken them. The first is, that our English drama was closing,' or actually had closed, just about the time when the French was opening. Shakspeare notoriously died in 1616, when Corneille [Footnote 14] was yet a child of ten, and the last of Shakspeare's great contemporary dramatists died, according to my remembrance, in 1636; and, in 1635, one year earlier, was first performed the first successful tragedy (the 'Medea') of Corneille. About seven or eight years after that, the Puritans officially suppressed the English drama by suppressing the theatres. At the opening of the Parliamentary war, the elder (that is, the immortal) English drama had finished its career. But Racine, the chief pillar of the French, did not begin until Cromwell was dead and gone, and Charles II. was restored. So, here we have the Asopian fable of the lamb troubling the waters for the wolf; or, in the Greek proverb, ano potamon. The other fact is, that, as no section whatever of the French literature has ever availed to influence, or in the slightest degree to modify, our own, it happens that the dramatic section in particular, which Pope insists on as the galvanizing force operating upon our seers, has been in the most signal repulsion to our own. All the other sections have been simply inert and neutral; but the drama has ever been in murderous antagonism to every principle and agency by which our own lives and moves. [Footnote 15] And to make this outrage upon truth and sense even more outrageous, Pope had not the excuse of those effeminate critics, sometimes found amongst ourselves, who recognise no special divinity in our own drama; that would have been one great crime the more, but it would have been one inconsistency the less. For Pope had been amongst the earliest editors of Shakspeare; he had written a memorable preface to this edition. The edition, it is true, was shocking; and if the preface even was disfigured by concessions to a feeble system of dramatic criticism, rhetorically it was brilliant with the expression of a genuine enthusiasm as to Shakspeare, and a true sympathy with his colossal power.
IV. Yet even this may not be the worst. Even below this deep perhaps there opens a lower deep. I submit that, when a man is asked for a specimen of the Agincourt French literature, he cannot safely produce a specimen from a literature two hundred and fifty years younger without some risk of facing a writ de lunatico inquirendo. Pompey the Pitiful (or, if the reader is vexed at hearing him so called, let us call him, with Lord Biron, in 'Love's Labor's Lost,' 'more than great, great Pompey—Pompey the Huge') was not published, even in France, until about two centuries and a quarter had elapsed from Agincourt. But, as respects England, eighteen-penny Pompey was not revealed; the fulness of time for his avatar amongst us did not arrive until something like two hundred and sixty years had winged their flight from Agincourt. And yet Pope's doctrine had been that, in the conquest of France, we English first met with the Prometheus that introduced us to the knowledge of fire and intellectual arts. Is not this ghastly? Elsewhere, indeed, Pope skulks away from his own doctrine, and talks of 'correctness' as the particular grace for which we were indebted to France. But this will not do. In his own 'Art of Criticism,' about verse 715, he describes 'us brave Britons' as incorrigibly rebellious in that particular. We have no correctness, it seems, nor ever had; and therefore, except upon Sir Richard Blackmore's principle of stealing a suit of clothes 'from a naked Pict,' it is hard to see how we need to thank France for that which, as to us, has no existence. Then, again, Pope acquiesced at other times in an opinion of his early friends, that not Pompey, but himself, was the predestined patriarch of 'correctness.' Walsh, who was a sublime old blockhead, suggested to Pope that 'correctness' was the only tight-rope upon which a fresh literary performer in England could henceforth dance with any advantage of novelty; all other tight-ropes and slack-ropes of every description having been preoccupied by elder funambulists. Both Walsh and Pope forgot ever once to ask themselves what it was that they meant by 'correctness;' an idea that, in its application to France, Akenside afterwards sternly ridiculed. Neither of the two literati stopped to consider whether it was correctness in thought, or metrical correctness, or correctness in syntax and idiom; as to all of which, by comparison with other poets, Pope is conspicuously deficient. But no matter what they meant, or if they meant nothing at all. Unmeaning, or in any case inconsistent, as this talk about 'correctness' may be, we cannot allow Pope so to escape from his own hyperbolical absurdities. It was not by a little pruning or weeding that France, according to his original proposition, had bettered our native literature—it was by genial incubation, by acts of vital creation. She, upon our crab-tree cudgel of Agincourt, had engrafted her own peaches and apricots—our sterile thorn France had inoculated with roses. English literature was the Eve that, in the shape of a rib, had been abstracted from the side of the slumbering Pompey—of unconscious Pompey the Huge. And all at the small charge of eighteen-pence! O heavens, to think of that! By any possibility, that the cost, the total 'damage' of our English literature should have been eighteen-pence!—that a shilling should actually be coming to us out of half-a-crown!
'Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem.'