Many friends came and went at the pleasant little villa by the Thames, "flanked by its two Courts" of Hampton and Kew, and often, no doubt, the London stage, starting from the Chequers in Piccadilly, brought to it guests bearing names familiar in the annals of the time. There are three of his intimates who cannot be neglected in any record, however brief. When Lady Mary came back to England she took up her residence at Twickenham, and the hitherto epistolary adoration of the poet became a practical fact. According to a story popularized by the pencil of Frith, Pope at length so far forgot himself as to make a declaration in form, to which she returned no reply but that most exasperating of all replies, ungovernable laughter. Whether this tradition be true or not, it is plain that she seems always to have remembered their difference of rank, and to have been rather cold than encouraging. The issue of the acquaintance is a sorry one. Pope revenged himself for her scorn in his worst and most unmanly fashion of innuendo; she, on her side, retorted with lampoons and satire as cruel. One feels glad that she finally left England and that further bickering was impossible. The other two persons were the already mentioned Blounts, each of whom seems at first to have by turn
"—blossomed in the light
Of tender personal regards;"
Teresa, the elder and handsomer, becoming by degrees the acknowledged favorite. But whether, like the lover in Prior's song, Pope "convey'd his treasure in a borrowed name," or merely changed his mind, it is certain that, at a later period, the younger, Martha, had proved the "real flame," to the permanent displacement of her sister. As time went on, Pope's attachment for Martha Blount continued to increase until she became almost an inmate of his house. For more than fifteen years, he told Gay in 1730, he had spent three or four hours a day in her company; and he seems to have loved her with an affection as genuine and as watchful as that which he showed to his parents. Like all his connections, this, too, was marred by strange pettinesses and curious contradictions; but one can scarcely grudge to his sickly sensitive nature the anodyne of feminine sympathy. Why so close and tender a friendship never ripened into marriage is an inquiry that may be consigned to the limbo of questions insoluble. It is enough that in the checkered chronicle of the loves of the poets, "blue-eyed Patty Blount" has an immortality almost as secure as that of Esther Johnson.
To return to Pope's works. In the first years of his Twickenham residence the "Iliad" was finished triumphantly, and Pope was invited by the booksellers to edit Shakespeare. The task was one for which he had few qualifications, and his execution of it at once laid him open to a new attack from a fresh opponent, Lewis Theobald, afterward the Tibbald of the "Dunciad" and the "Satires." Then he followed up the "Iliad" by the "Odyssey," in which he was assisted by Fenton and Broome. Toward 1725 Bolingbroke settled at Dawley, and in the succeeding year Swift paid a long visit to Pope at Twickenham. These two influences may be traced in most of Pope's remaining works. In 1726, "Gulliver's Travels" saw the light, and in 1727 were issued those joint volumes of "Miscellanies" which contained the "Treatise on the Bathos," a prose satire, to be supplanted in brief space by the terrible "Dunciad." In this last, Pope entered upon a campaign against the smaller fry of the pen with a vigor, a deadly earnestness, and a determination to wound, unparalleled in the history of letters. One of the most gifted of his critics, the late Rector of Lincoln College, speaks of the "Dunciad" roundly as "an amalgam of dirt, ribaldry, and petty spite," and M. Taine brought against it the more fatal charge of tediousness. But even if one admits the indiscriminate nature of that onslaught which confuses Bentley with such creatures of a day as Ralph and Oldmixon, it is impossible not to admire the surpassing skill of the measure; and it is probable that, in spite of the "higher criticism," the "Dunciad," swarming as it does with contemporary allusions, will continue to hold its own with the antiquary and the literary historian, though it has ceased to be regarded as one of the desirable masterpieces of its class.
If Swift, who encouraged Pope in his war against Dulness, must be held to be indirectly responsible for the attack upon its strongholds, it was Bolingbroke who suggested the once popular epistles which Pope dedicated to him under the title of the "Essay on Man," a work which has this in common with the earlier "Essay on Criticism," that it is a versification of a given theme. But Pope understood the precepts of Rapin and Bossu better than the precepts of Leibnitz and St. John, and the "Essay on Man," bristling as it does with axiomatic felicities and "jewels five words long," has long been discredited as a philosophical treatise. It is to another hint from the sage of Dawley that we owe its author's most individual work. A chance remark of Bolingbroke set him upon the imitations of Horace that grew into the "Satires and Epistles." In these and the cognate "Moral Essays," which belong to his ripest period of production, Pope's unmatched mastery over heroics, perfected by the long probation of his Homeric translations, and his equally unrivalled powers of satire, let loose and emboldened by the brutalities of the "Dunciad," found their fitting field. Aimed at the old eternal vices and frailties of humanity, they assail them with a pungency, a force, a wit, and a directness which, in English verse, have no parallel. Indeed it may be doubted whether the portraits of Bufo and Sporus, of Atossa and Atticus, have been excelled in any language whatsoever.
The first of the Dialogues known as the "Epilogue to the Satires" was published in 1738, on the same morning as Johnson's "London," thus (in Boswell's view) providing England simultaneously with its Horace and its Juvenal. The second part followed in the same year. Besides these there is little which is material to be added to the record of Pope's work but the revised "Dunciad," in which, to gratify an increased antipathy, he displaced its old hero, Theobald, in favor of Colley Cibber, who, whatever his faults, was certainly not a typical dunce. Toward the close of his life those infirmities at which Wycherley had hinted in his youth grew upon him, and he became almost entirely dependent upon nurses. He had not, to use De Quincey's words, drawn that supreme prize in life, "a fine intellect with a healthy stomach," and his whole story testifies to that fact. As years went on his little figure, in its rusty black, was seen more rarely in the Twickenham lanes, and if he took the air upon the Thames, it was in a sedan-chair that was lifted into a boat. When he visited his friends his sleeplessness and his multiplied needs tired out the servants; while in the day-time he would nod in company, even though the Prince of Wales was talking of poetry. He was a martyr to sick headaches, and in the intervals of relief from them would be tormented by all sorts of morbid cravings for the very dietary which must inevitably secure their recurrence. This continued battle of the brain with the ignobler organs goes far to explain, if it may not excuse, much of the less admirable side of his character. His irritability, his artifice, his meannesses even, are more intelligible in the case of a man habitually racked with pain, and morbidly conscious of his physical shortcomings, than they would be in the case of those "whom God has made full-limbed and tall;" and, in the noble teaching of Arthur's court, his infirmities should entitle him to a larger charity of judgment.
Nothing in his life is more touching than the account of his last days, when he lay wasted with an intolerable asthma, waiting serenely for the end, but full of kindness and tender thoughtfulness for the friends who came and went about his bed. Bolingbroke was often there from Battersea, stirred to philosophic utterances and unphilosophic tears, and grave Lyttleton, and kind Lord Marchmont, and faithful Joseph Spence. Martha Blount, too, was not absent, and "it was very observable," said the spectators, how the sick man's strength and spirits seemed to revive at the approach of his favorite. "Here I am dying of a hundred good symptoms," he said to one of his visitors. What humiliated him most was his inability to think. "One of the things that I have always most wondered at (he told Spence) is that there should be any such thing as human vanity. If I had any, I had enough to mortify it a few days ago, for I lost my mind for a whole day." A little later Spence is telling Bolingbroke how, "on every catching and recovering of his mind," Pope is "always saying something kind either of his present or absent friends," and that it seems "as if his humanity had outlived his understanding." But the vital spark still continued to flicker in its socket, and only a day or two before his death he sat for three whole hours in his sedan-chair, in the garden he loved so well, then filled with the blossoms of May and smelling of the summer he was not to see. On the 29th he took an airing in Bushy Park, and a little later received the sacrament. On the evening of the following day he passed away so softly and painlessly that those who stood by knew not "the exact time of his departure." He had lived fifty-six years and nine days, and he was buried near to the monument of his father in the chancel of Twickenham Church. Seventeen years afterward Bishop Warburton erected a tablet to him in the same building, with an epitaph as idle as that which disgraces the tomb of Gay in Westminster Abbey. It is possible that Pope may at some time have written it, but the terms of his will prove conclusively that he never intended it to be used.
What is Pope's position as a poet? Time, that great practitioner of the exhaustive process, "sifting alway, sifting ever," even to the point of annihilation, has already half answered the question. No one now, except the literary historian or the student of versification, is ever likely to consult the "Pastorals" or "Windsor Forest;" and men will, in all probability, continue to quote "Hope springs eternal in the human breast" and "A little learning is a dangerous thing," without the least suspicion that the one comes from the seldom-read "Essay on Criticism" and the other from the equally seldom-read "Essay on Man." Here and there a professor like the late Professor Conington will praise the "unhasting unresting flow" of the translations from Homer; but the next generation will read its "Iliad" in the Greek, or in some future successor to Mr. William Morris or Mr. Way. Few now re-echo the praises which the critics of fifty years ago gave to the "Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady" and "Eloisa to Abelard;" nor do any but the habitual pilgrims of the by-ways of literature devote their serious attention to the different versions of the "Dunciad." But there is no reason why the "Rape of the Lock" should not find as many admirers a hundred years hence as it does to-day, or why—so long as men remember the poems of the friend of Mæcenas—the "Satires and Epistles" should fail of an audience. In these Pope's verse is as perfect as it is anywhere; and his subject is borrowed, not from his commonplace book, but from his own experiences. He wants, it is true, the careless ease, the variety, the unemphatic grace of the Roman writer. But he has many of the qualities of his master; and it is probable that only when men weary of hearing how Horace strolled down the Sacred Way and met an intolerable Bore—only then, or perhaps a little earlier, will they cease to hearken how Alexander Pope bade John Searle bar the door at Twickenham against the combined inroad of Bedlam and Parnassus.[Back to Contents]
