"John.—Stay, not so fast. I like the writers of that period, for the transparency of their style, and their freedom from affection. If I may trust my understanding of your meaning, our modern versifiers have only made the simple discovery, that an appearance of antiquity is the cheapest passport to respect. But the cheapest which we purchase with subservience is too dear. You yourself have no such prejudice against the Augustan age of English literature. I have caught you more than once with the Tatler in your hand, and have heard you praising Dryden's prefaces.
"Philip.—You and I have very different notions of what poetry is, and of what its object should be. You may claim for Pope the merit of an envious eye, which could turn the least scratch upon the character of a friend into a fester, of a nimble and adroit fancy, and of an ear so niggardly that it could afford but one invariable cæsura to his verse; but, when you call him poet, you insult the buried majesty of all earth's noblest and choicest spirits. Nature should lead the true poet by the hand, and he has far better things to do than to busy himself in counting the warts upon it, as Pope did. A cup of water from Hippocrene, tasting, as it must, of innocent pastoral sights and sounds, of the bleat of lambs, of the shadows of leaves and flowers that have leaned over it, of the rosy hands of children whose privilege it ever is to paddle in it, of the low words of lovers who have walked by its side in the moonlight, of the tears of the poor Hagars of the world who have drunk from it, would choke a satirist. His thoughts of the country must have a savour of Jack Ketch, and see no beauty but in a hemp field. Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth which God has set in all men's souls; not by picking out the petty faults of our neighbours to make a mock of. Shall that divine instinct, which has in all ages concerned itself only with what is holiest and fairest in life and nature, degrade itself to go about seeking for the scabs and ulcers of the putridest spirits, to grin over with a derision more hideous even than the pitiful quarry it has moused at? Asmodeus's gift, of unroofing the dwellings of his neighbours at will, would be the rarest outfit for a satirist, but it would be of no worth to a poet. To the satirist the mere outward motives of life are enough. Vanity, pride, avarice—these, and the other external vices, are the strings of his unmusical lyre. But the poet need only unroof his own heart. All that makes happiness or misery under every roof of the wide world, whether of palace or hovel, is working also in that narrow yet boundless sphere. On that little stage the great drama of life is acted daily. There the creation, the tempting, and the fall, may be seen anew. In that withdrawing closet, solitude whispers her secrets, and death uncovers his face. There sorrow takes up her abode, to make ready a pillow and a resting-place for the weary head of love, whom the world casts out. To the poet nothing is mean, but every thing on earth is a fitting altar to the supreme beauty.
"But I am wandering. As for the poets of Queen Anne's reign, it is enough to prove what a kennel standard of poetry was then established, that Swift's smutchy verses are not even yet excluded from the collections. What disgusting stuff, too, in Prior and Parnell! Yet Swift, perhaps, as the best writer of English whom that period produced. Witness his prose. Pope treated the English language as the image-man has served the bust of Shakspeare yonder. To rid it of some external soils, he has rubbed it down till there is no muscular expression left. It looks very much as his own 'mockery king of snow' must have done after it had begun to melt. Pope is for ever mixing water with the good old mother's milk of our tongue. You cannot get a straightforward speech out of him. A great deal of his poetry is so incased in verbiage, that it puts me in mind of those important-looking packages which boys are fond of sending to their friends. We unfold envelope after envelope, and at last find a couple of cherry-stones. But in Pope we miss the laugh which in the other case follows the culmination of the joke. He makes Homer lisp like the friar in Chaucer and Ajax and Belinda talk exactly alike.
"John.—Well, we are not discussing the merits of Pope, but of the archaisms which have been introduced into modern poetry. What you say of the Bible has some force in it. The forms of speech used in our version of it will always impress the mind, even if applied to an entirely different subject. What else can you bring forward?
"Philip.—Only the fact, that, by going back to the more natural style of the Elizabethan writers, our verse has gained in harmony as well as strength. No matter whether Pope is describing the cane of a fop, or the speech of a demigod, the pause must always fall on the same syllable, and the sense be chopped off by the same rhyme. Achilles cannot gallop his horses round the walls of Troy, with Hector dragging behind his chariot, except he keep time to the immitigable seesaw of the couplet."
Master Lowell gives tongue with a plagiarism from Southey. In his Life of Cowper that great writer somewhat rashly says, "The age of Pope was the golden age of poets—but it was the pinchbeck age of poetry." What is pardonable in Southey is knoutable in his ape. Think of one American Cantab playfully rating and complimenting another on having caught him more than once with the Tatler in his hand, and with having heard him praising Dryden's prefaces! What liberality—nay, what universality of taste! Absolutely able, in the reaches of his transatlantic soul, to relish Dryden's prefaces! But in his appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober, Philip cannot, crop-sick, but nauseate the thought of Pope being a poet.
The whole dialogue—somewhat of the longest—tedious exceedingly—is polluted with similar impudencies. "The strong point in Pope's displays of sentiment, is in the graceful management of a cambric handkerchief. You do not believe a word that Heloïse says, and feel all the while that she is squeezing out her tears as if from a half-dry sponge." Such is the effect of too copious draughts from that Hippocrene which alternately discharges cock-tail and mint-julep. John, however, does not go the whole hog with Philip. He erects his ears to their full length, and brays thus—"I do not think that you do Pope justice!" and then does Pope justice as follows: "His translation of Homer is as bad as it can be, I admit!" I admit! "But surely you cannot deny the merit of lively and ingenious fancy to his 'Rape of the Lock;' nor of knowledge of life, and a certain polished classicalness, to his epistles and satires. His portraits are like those of Copley, of fine gentlemen and ladies, whose silks and satins are the best part of them." But poor, cautious, timid, trimming, turn-about John cannot so conciliate bully Philip, who squabashes at once both poet and critic.
"Philip.—I cannot allow the parallel. In Copley's best pictures, the drapery, though you may almost hear it rustle, is wholly a subordinate matter. Witness some of those in our College-hall here at Cambridge—that of Madam Boylston especially. I remember being once much struck with the remark of a friend, who convinced me of the fact, that Copley avoided the painting of wigs whenever he could, thus getting a step nearer nature. Pope would have made them a prominent object. I grant what you say about the 'Rape of the Lock,' but this does not prove that Pope was a poet. If you wish an instance of a poet's fancy, look into the 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' I can allow that Pope has written what is entertaining, but surely not poetical. Show me a line that makes you love God and your neighbour better, that inclines you to meekness, charity, and forbearance, and I will show you a hundred that make it easier for you to be the odious reverse of all these. In many a Pagan poet there is more Christianity. No poet could write a 'Dunciad,' or even read it. You have persuaded yourself into thinking Pope a poet, as, in looking for a long time at a stick which we believe to be an animal of some kind, we fancy that it is stirring. His letters are amusing, but do not increase one's respect for him. When you speak of his being classical, I am sure that you jest."
The waves of the Atlantic have wafted acorns dropped from the British oak to the Western shores, and a wide and strong grove is growing up there. We feel our kindred with the fellow-beings of our tongue, and rejoice with a natural and keen interest in every thing true, great, and good that is produced within the States. Powers are moving there, that may, that do, want much tempering; but of which, when tempered, we augur high things. One such tempering is reverence of the past, and Pope is one of the great names which England tenders to young America. We augur ill, and are uneasy for our cousins or nephews, when we see them giving themselves airs, and knowing better than their betters. What are we to think, when instead of the fresh vigour which should rise on the soil of the self-governed, we find repetition, for the worse, of the feeblest criticisms which have disgraced some of our own weaklings? This presumptuous youngling talks technically, and does not know what he is talking about. Pope has not but one invariable cæsura to his verse. He has an ordinary range of four places for his cæsura, and the variety and music which he manages to give his verse under that scheme, dictated by a sensitive ear, is truly wonderful. That Pope is only a satirist, and can find nothing in humanity but its faults, infirmities, and disgraces to feed upon with delight, is a shameful falsehood. He is as generous in praise as he is galling in sarcasm; and the voice of Christian Europe has pronounced him a moral and religious poet. It is rather strange to see the stickler for the beauty and exaltation of poetry, diligent in purifying and ennobling the taste of his countrymen, by raking in the dirt for disgusting and loathsome images, to express his slanderous character of a writer, eminent among the best for purity and refinement. We take leave of Mr Lowell with remarking, that his affected and hyperbolical praises heaped on the old English dramatists are as nauseous as any ignorant exaggeration can be, bombastically protruded on us at second-hand, from an article in an old number of the Retrospective Review, from which most of the little he knows is taken, and in the taking, turned into most monstrous nonsense.
Friends of our soul! Permit us, now, in this our Supplement, to suggest to your recollection, that Satire is public or private. Public satire is, or would he, authoritative, robed, magisterial censure. Private satire is private warfare—the worst plague of the state, and the overthrow of all right law. It is worse. For when baron besieges baron, there is high spirit roused, and high deeds are achieved. But private malice in verse is as if the gossiping dames of a tea-table were armed with daggers instead of words, to kill reputations—the School for Scandal turned into a tragedy. We are groaning now over the inferior versifiers. To the Poets, to the mighty ones, we forgave every thing, a month ago. We say then, again, that although duly appointed to this Chair of Justice in which we sit, and having our eyes bandaged like the Goddess whose statue is in the corner of the hall, yet our hands are open, and we are willing—as in all well-governed kingdoms judges have been willing—to take bribes. But we let it be known, we must be bribed high. Juvenal, Persius, Horace, Dryden, and Pope have soothed the itching of our palms to our heart's content; and each has gained his cause in or impartial court. Nay, we are very much afraid, that if that gall-fed, parricidal ruffian, Archilochus, who twisted his verses into a halter for noosing up his wife's father—a melancholy event to which the old gentleman, it is said, lent a helping-hand—were more to us than a tradition, we should be in danger of finding in the poignancy of his iambics a sauce too much to our relish. Avec cette sauce—cried the French gastronome, by the ecstasy of his palate bewitched out of his moral discretion—Avec cette sauce on mangerait son père!