CHAPTER VI ALEXANDER POPE THE poetry of Pope reflects all the contrary influences that were struggling in the English imagination during the first half of the eighteenth century. Born in 1688, the year of the Revolution, he came of a family whose religion that Revolution tended to proscribe. By his studious habits he made himself at an early age familiar with the manner of the English poetry produced under the old régime. His great precocity, on the other hand, brought him, while still little more than a boy, into companionship with men of affairs. He was a protégé of Harley, a friend of Swift and Arbuthnot, an acquaintance of Addison. Before he was twenty-one he threw into a form of metrical criticism ideas of a kind that were engaging the attention of the best writers in The Spectator. Before he was twenty-four he had invented a form of unrivalled brilliancy to reflect the passing manners of aristocratic society. In a softer mood he caught in his verse something of the tone of gallantry and romance still lingering from the chivalry of past ages, but from this he soon turned to indulge his genius for satire in a protracted war with the literary Dunces of his own day. ambiguous theology of the time provided him with materials for didactic poetry; its manners with subjects for moral satire; in the decline of life he found himself using his favourite weapon, in defence of the cause, and in the front ranks, of the political Opposition. Alike in his poetry, his criticism, and his correspondence, we The seem to see the mind of the country taking an external shape during the period of struggle that followed the first establishment of Civil Liberty. Alexander Pope was born in London on the 21st of May 1688. His father, a linen-draper in Lombard Street, is thought with some probability to have been the son of Alexander Pope, Rector of Thruxton in Hampshire, and seems to have been converted from Protestantism at Lisbon, where he had been placed with a merchant to learn business. The young Alexander's education was slight and desultory, his first tutor being William Bannister, a Roman Catholic priest, from whose care he was removed to a Roman Catholic School at Twyford, near Winchester, and afterwards to one kept by Thomas Deane, a pervert from the Anglican Church, who had once been a Fellow of University College, Oxford. When his father left London about 1700 to live at Binfield in Windsor Forest he was again placed under the charge of a priest, but was removed from it after a few months. "This," he said afterwards to Spence, "was all the teaching I ever had, and God knows it extended a very little way."1 3 At Binfield he was left very much to his own inclinations, which carried him over a wide range of discursive study : In a few years (he says of himself) I had dipped into a great number of the English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets. This I did without any design but that of pleasing myself, and got the languages by hunting after the stories in the several poets I read, rather than read the books to get the languages.2 From studying the poets he went on to imitate them : My first taking to imitating (he told Spence) was not out of vanity but humility: I saw how defective my own things were, and endeavoured to mend my manner by copying good strokes from others, 3 The original compositions, to which he thus refers, were the Ode to Solitude, written in his twelfth year, and 1 Spence, Anecdotes, p. 193. 2 Ibid. p. 193. 3 Ibid. p. 278. 3 1 Alcander, an epic poem composed when he was between thirteen and fifteen, which he afterwards burned, preserving from it two couplets, one in the Essay on Criticism, and one in The Dunciad.2 In his fourteenth year he also wrote a satire against the author of Successio, a couplet of which he used for The Dunciad He interested himself besides at the same age in theology, and told Atterbury in later years that the controversy between the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches made him turn Papist or Protestant according to the last book he read. Meditating on all these things in long solitary walks through Windsor Forest, he acquired those habits of morbid introspection which clung to him through life, and were the source of some of his most deplorable actions. When he was about fifteen he translated the First Book of Statius' Thebais; but as this work was not published till 1713, the first draft of it was no doubt thoroughly revised in the interval. A year later, according to his own account, he composed his Pastorals, which were certainly in existence before 20th April 1706, when one of them had been seen by Tonson, who desired to have the privilege of printing the series. They did not appear in print, however, till 2nd May, when they were published as part of Tonson's Sixth Miscellany. All of them were written by Pope on the assumption that Pastoral was one of the natural divisions of poetry, and therefore subject to rules of the same kind that Aristotle prescribed for the Drama. In the "Discourse on Pastoral Poetry," which he prefixed to them in 1717, he says: A pastoral is an imitation of the action of a shepherd, or one considered under that character. The form of this imitation is dramatic, or narrative, or mixed of both; the fable simple; the manners not too polite nor too rustic; the thoughts are plain, yet admit a little quickness, but that short and flowing; the expression humble, yet as pure as the language will afford; neat but not florid; easy and yet lively. In short the fable, manners, thoughts, and expressions, are full of the greatest simplicity in 1 Essay on Criticism, 191-192. 2 Dunciad, iii. 55-56. 3 Ibid. i. 183-184. nature. The complete character of this poem consists in simplicity, brevity, and delicacy; the two first of which render an Eclogue natural, and the last delightful. 1 This view is not very different from the self-conscious theory of the Pastoral defined by Fontenelle, on whose Discourse Pope largely based his own.1 In the same Miscellany were Six Pastorals by Ambrose Philips, which professed to depend upon a somewhat different principle : There is no kind of poem (says Philips), if happily executed, but gives delight; and herein may the pastoral boast after a peculiar manner; for as in painting, so in poetry, the country affords not only the most delightful scenes and prospects, but likewise the most pleasing images of life. Philips' Pastorals had no more claim than Pope's to be considered "simple" or "natural." They too were written in the heroic couplet, and the only approach that their author made towards Anglicising his shepherds was to give them the clownish names invented by Spenser, and to make them talk of fairies instead of the sylvan deities of Greece and Rome. Both poets, however, were loudly applauded for their performances, and Pope was therefore, for the moment, quite ready to be magnanimous in praising his rival, of whose pastorals he said that "we had no better Eclogues in our language." He continued his own work in this direction by writing, about the same time, the pastoral descriptions of Windsor Forest; and, a little later, by adapting the Messianic passages in Isaiah to the style of Virgil's Fourth Eclogue. His Messiah was published in The Spectator on the 14th of May 1712. 2 Events soon gave a new turn to his feelings. As often happens happens where literary coteries are concerned, Philips began to be praised at the expense of Pope. The former was a leading member of the Whig Club at 1 "Il en va, ce me semble, des Eglogues, comme des habits que l'on prend dans les Balets pour representer des Paysans. Ils sont d'etofes beaucoup plus belles que ceux des Paisans veritables, ils sont même ornés de rubans et de points, et on les taille seulement en habits de Paisans.”—Traité sur la nature de l'Eglogue. 2 Extending as far as v. 290. Button's, and his political friends were inclined to discover wonderful qualities in his poetry. Addison began with a puffing allusion in The Spectator. "We see," he says, “he has given a new life, and a more natural beauty to this way of writing, by substituting in the place of those antiquated fables the superstitious mythology which prevails among the shepherds of our own country." In course of time this thoroughly undeserved panegyric was expanded, in five papers of The Guardian, by a writer who demonstrated that there had only been four true masters of pastoral poetry in above two thousand years: "Theocritus, who left his dominions to Virgil; Virgil, who left his to his son, Spenser; and Spenser, who was succeeded by his eldest born, Philips." Pope, who was not mentioned, was annoyed, and resolved to expose the falseness of the criticism by a trick equally witty and dexterous. He wrote a sixth paper, in the same exaggerated vein of flattery, contrasting Philips with Pope, the professed imitator of the Classics. This he sent anonymously to Steele, as editor of The Guardian; and the latter is said to have been completely deceived by the irony, and to have only printed the paper after first showing it to Pope, who professed his indifference to the criticism. Admirable as the gravity of the style is, it is somewhat difficult to believe that an Irishman like Steele should have failed to perceive the ridicule of the following praise of Philips' "beautiful rusticity": "O woful day! O day of woe!" quoth she, The simplicity of diction (says Pope), the melancholy flowing of the numbers, the solemnity of the sound, and the easy turn of the words in this dirge (to make use of our author's expression) are extremely elegant. In another of his pastorals a shepherd utters a dirge not much inferior to the former in the following lines :— Ah me the while! ah me! the luckless day! Ah luckless lad! the rather might I say; Ah silly I! more silly than my sheep, Which on the flowery plains I once did keep! |