Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot
Introduction
Perhaps no other great poet in
English Literature has been so differently judged at different times
as Alexander Pope. Accepted almost on his first appearance as one of
the leading poets of the day, he rapidly became recognized as the
foremost man of letters of his age. He held this position throughout
his life, and for over half a century after his death his works were
considered not only as masterpieces, but as the finest models of
poetry. With the change of poetic temper that occurred at the
beginning of the nineteenth century Pope's fame was overshadowed. The
romantic poets and critics even raised the question whether Pope was
a poet at all. And as his poetical fame diminished, the harsh
judgments of his personal character increased. It is almost
incredible with what exulting bitterness critics and editors of Pope
have tracked out and exposed his petty intrigues, exaggerated his
delinquencies, misrepresented his actions, attempted in short to
blast his character as a man.Both as a man and as a poet Pope
is sadly in need of a defender to-day. And a defense is by no means
impossible. The depreciation of Pope's poetry springs, in the main,
from an attempt to measure it by other standards than those which he
and his age recognized. The attacks upon his character are due, in
large measure, to a misunderstanding of the spirit of the times in
which he lived and to a forgetfulness of the special circumstances of
his own life. Tried in a fair court by impartial judges Pope as a
poet would be awarded a place, if not among the noblest singers, at
least high among poets of the second order. And the flaws of
character which even his warmest apologist must admit would on the
one hand be explained, if not excused, by circumstances, and on the
other more than counterbalanced by the existence of noble qualities
to which his assailants seem to have been quite blind.Alexander
Pope was born in London on May 21, 1688. His father was a Roman
Catholic linen draper, who had married a second time. Pope was the
only child of this marriage, and seems to have been a delicate,
sweet-tempered, precocious, and, perhaps, a rather spoiled
child.Pope's religion and his chronic ill-health are two
facts of the highest importance to be taken into consideration in any
study of his life or judgment of his character. The high hopes of the
Catholics for a restoration of their religion had been totally
destroyed by the Revolution of 1688. During all Pope's lifetime they
were a sect at once feared, hated, and oppressed by the severest
laws. They were excluded from the schools and universities, they were
burdened with double taxes, and forbidden to acquire real estate. All
public careers were closed to them, and their property and even their
persons were in times of excitement at the mercy of informers. In the
last year of Pope's life a proclamation was issued forbidding
Catholics to come within ten miles of London, and Pope himself, in
spite of his influential friends, thought it wise to comply with this
edict. A fierce outburst of persecution often evokes in the
persecuted some of the noblest qualities of human nature; but a
long-continued and crushing tyranny that extends to all the details
of daily life is only too likely to have the most unfortunate results
on those who are subjected to it. And as a matter of fact we find
that the well-to-do Catholics of Pope's day lived in an atmosphere of
disaffection, political intrigue, and evasion of the law, most
unfavorable for the development of that frank, courageous, and
patriotic spirit for the lack of which Pope himself has so often been
made the object of reproach.In a well-known passage of the
Epistle to Arbuthnot, Pope has spoken of his life as one long
disease. He was in fact a humpbacked dwarf, not over four feet six
inches in height, with long, spider-like legs and arms. He was
subject to violent headaches, and his face was lined and contracted
with the marks of suffering. In youth he so completely ruined his
health by perpetual studies that his life was despaired of, and only
the most careful treatment saved him from an early death. Toward the
close of his life he became so weak that he could neither dress nor
undress without assistance. He had to be laced up in stiff stays in
order to sit erect, and wore a fur doublet and three pairs of
stockings to protect himself against the cold. With these physical
defects he had the extreme sensitiveness of mind that usually
accompanies chronic ill health, and this sensitiveness was outraged
incessantly by the brutal customs of the age. Pope's enemies made as
free with his person as with his poetry, and there is little doubt
that he felt the former attacks the more bitterly of the two. Dennis,
his first critic, called him "a short squab gentleman, the very
bow of the God of love; his outward form is downright monkey." A
rival poet whom he had offended hung up a rod in a coffee house where
men of letters resorted, and threatened to whip Pope like a naughty
child if he showed his face there. It is said, though perhaps not on
the best authority, that when Pope once forgot himself so far as to
make love to Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the lady's answer was "a
fit of immoderate laughter." In an appendix to the Dunciad Pope
collected some of the epithets with which his enemies had pelted him,
"an ape," "an ass," "a frog," "a
coward," "a fool," "a little abject thing."
He affected, indeed, to despise his assailants, but there is only too
good evidence that their poisoned arrows rankled in his heart.
Richardson, the painter, found him one day reading the latest abusive
pamphlet. "These things are my diversion," said the poet,
striving to put the best face on it; but as he read, his friends saw
his features "writhen with anguish," and prayed to be
delivered from all such "diversions" as these. Pope's
enemies and their savage abuse are mostly forgotten to-day. Pope's
furious retorts have been secured to immortality by his genius. It
would have been nobler, no doubt, to have answered by silence only;
but before one condemns Pope it is only fair to realize the causes of
his bitterness.Pope's education was short and irregular. He
was taught the rudiments of Latin and Greek by his family priest,
attended for a brief period a school in the country and another in
London, and at the early age of twelve left school altogether, and
settling down at his father's house in the country began to read to
his heart's delight. He roamed through the classic poets, translating
passages that pleased him, went up for a time to London to get
lessons in French and Italian, and above all read with eagerness and
attention the works of older English poets, — Spenser, Waller, and
Dryden. He had already, it would seem, determined to become a poet,
and his father, delighted with the clever boy's talent, used to set
him topics, force him to correct his verses over and over, and
finally, when satisfied, dismiss him with the praise, "These are
good rhymes." He wrote a comedy, a tragedy, an epic poem, all of
which he afterward destroyed and, as he laughingly confessed in later
years, he thought himself "the greatest genius that ever
was."Pope was not alone, however, in holding a high
opinion of his talents. While still a boy in his teens he was taken
up and patronized by a number of gentlemen, Trumbull, Walsh, and
Cromwell, all dabblers in poetry and criticism. He was introduced to
the dramatist Wycherly, nearly fifty years his senior, and helped to
polish some of the old man's verses. His own works were passed about
in manuscript from hand to hand till one of them came to the eyes of
Dryden's old publisher, Tonson. Tonson wrote Pope a respectful letter
asking for the honor of being allowed to publish them. One may fancy
the delight with which the sixteen-year-old boy received this offer.
It is a proof of Pope's patience as well as his precocity that he
delayed three years before accepting it. It was not till 1709 that
his first published verses, the Pastorals, a fragment translated from
Homer, and a modernized version of one of the Canterbury Tales,
appeared in Tonson's Miscellany.With the publication of the
Pastorals, Pope embarked upon his life as a man of letters. They seem
to have brought him a certain recognition, but hardly fame. That he
obtained by his next poem, the Essay on Criticism, which appeared in
1711. It was applauded in the Spectator, and Pope seems about this
time to have made the acquaintance of Addison and the little senate
which met in Button's coffee house. His poem the Messiah appeared in
the Spectator in May 1712; the first draft of The Rape of the Lock in
a poetical miscellany in the same year, and Addison's request, in
1713, that he compose a prologue for the tragedy of Cato set the
final stamp upon his rank as a poet.Pope's friendly relations
with Addison and his circle were not, however, long continued. In the
year 1713 he gradually drew away from them and came under the
influence of Swift, then at the height of his power in political and
social life. Swift introduced him to the brilliant Tories,
politicians and lovers of letters, Harley, Bolingbroke, and
Atterbury, who were then at the head of affairs. Pope's new friends
seem to have treated him with a deference which he had never
experienced before, and which bound him to them in unbroken
affection. Harley used to regret that Pope's religion rendered him
legally incapable of holding a sinecure office in the government,
such as was frequently bestowed in those days upon men of letters,
and Swift jestingly offered the young poet twenty guineas to become a
Protestant. But now, as later, Pope was firmly resolved not to
abandon the faith of his parents for the sake of worldly advantage.
And in order to secure the independence he valued so highly he
resolved to embark upon the great work of his life, the translation
of Homer.
"What led me into that,"
he told a friend long after, "was purely the want of money. I
had then none; not even to buy books."
It seems that about this time, 1713,
Pope's father had experienced some heavy financial losses, and the
poet, whose receipts in money had so far been by no means in
proportion to the reputation his works had brought him, now resolved
to use that reputation as a means of securing from the public a sum
which would at least keep him for life from poverty or the necessity
of begging for patronage. It is worth noting that Pope was the first
Englishman of letters who threw himself thus boldly upon the public
and earned his living by his pen.The arrangements for the
publication and sale of Pope's translation of Homer were made with
care and pushed on with enthusiasm. He issued in 1713 his proposals
for an edition to be published by subscription, and his friends at
once became enthusiastic canvassers. We have a characteristic picture
of Swift at this time, bustling about a crowded ante-chamber, and
informing the company that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope (a
Papist) who had begun a translation of Homer for which they must all
subscribe, "for," says he, "the author shall not begin
to print till I have a thousand guineas for him." The work was
to be in six volumes, each costing a guinea. Pope obtained 575
subscribers, many of whom took more than one set. Lintot, the
publisher, gave Pope £1200 for the work and agreed to supply the
subscription copies free of charge. As a result Pope made something
between £5000 and £6000, a sum absolutely unprecedented in the
history of English literature, and amply sufficient to make him
independent for life.But the sum was honestly earned by hard
and wearisome work. Pope was no Greek scholar; it is said, indeed,
that he was just able to make out the sense of the original with a
translation. And in addition to the fifteen thousand lines of the
Iliad, he had engaged to furnish an introduction and notes. At first
the magnitude of the undertaking frightened him.
"What terrible moments,"
he said to Spence, "does one feel after one has engaged for a
large work. In the beginning of my translating the Iliad, I wished
anybody would hang me a hundred times. It sat so heavily on my mind
at first that I often used to dream of it and do sometimes still."
In spite of his discouragement,
however, and of the ill health which so constantly beset him, Pope
fell gallantly upon his task, and as time went on came almost to
enjoy it. He used to translate thirty or forty verses in the morning
before rising and, in his own characteristic phrase, "piddled
over them for the rest of the day." He used every assistance
possible, drew freely upon the scholarship of friends, corrected and
recorrected with a view to obtaining clearness and point, and finally
succeeded in producing a version which not only satisfied his own
critical judgment, but was at once accepted by the English-speaking
world as the standard translation of Homer.The first volume
came out in June, 1715, and to Pope's dismay and wrath a rival
translation appeared almost simultaneously. Tickell, one of Addison's
"little senate," had also begun a translation of the Iliad,
and although he announced in the preface that he intended to withdraw
in favor of Pope and take up a translation of the Odyssey, the poet's
suspicions were at once aroused. And they were quickly fanned into a
flame by the gossip of the town which reported that Addison, the
recognized authority in literary criticism, pronounced Tickell's
version "the best that ever was in any language." Rumor
went so far, in fact, as to hint pretty broadly that Addison himself
was the author, in part, at least, of Tickell's book; and Pope, who
had been encouraged by Addison to begin his long task, felt at once
that he had been betrayed. His resentment was all the more bitter
since he fancied that Addison, now at the height of his power and
prosperity in the world of letters and of politics, had attempted to
ruin an enterprise on which the younger man had set all his hopes of
success and independence, for no better reason than literary jealousy
and political estrangement. We know now that Pope was mistaken, but
there was beyond question some reason at the time for his thinking as
he did, and it is to the bitterness which this incident caused in his
mind that we owe the famous satiric portrait of Addison as
Atticus.The last volume of the Iliad appeared in the spring
of 1720, and in it Pope gave a renewed proof of his independence by
dedicating the whole work, not to some lord who would have rewarded
him with a handsome present, but to his old acquaintance, Congreve,
the last survivor of the brilliant comic dramatists of Dryden's day.
And now resting for a time from his long labors, Pope turned to the
adornment and cultivation of the little house and garden that he had
leased at Twickenham.Pope's father had died in 1717, and the
poet, rejecting politely but firmly the suggestion of his friend,
Atterbury, that he might now turn Protestant, devoted himself with
double tenderness to the care of his aged and infirm mother. He
brought her with him to Twickenham, where she lived till 1733, dying
in that year at the great age of ninety-one. It may have been partly
on her account that Pope pitched upon Twickenham as his abiding
place. Beautifully situated on the banks of the Thames, it was at
once a quiet country place and yet of easy access to London, to
Hampton Court, or to Kew. The five acres of land that lay about the
house furnished Pope with inexhaustible entertainment for the rest of
his life. He "twisted and twirled and harmonized" his bit
of ground "till it appeared two or three sweet little lawns
opening and opening beyond one another, the whole surrounded by
impenetrable woods." Following the taste of his times in
landscape gardening, he adorned his lawns with artificial mounds, a
shell temple, an obelisk, and a colonnade. But the crowning glory was
the grotto, a tunnel decorated fantastically with shells and bits of
looking-glass, which Pope dug under a road that ran through his
grounds. Here Pope received in state, and his house and garden was
for years the center of the most brilliant society in England. Here
Swift came on his rare visits from Ireland, and Bolingbroke on his
return from exile. Arbuthnot, Pope's beloved physician, was a
frequent visitor, and Peterborough, one of the most distinguished of
English soldiers, condescended to help lay out the garden. Congreve
came too, at times, and Gay, the laziest and most good-natured of
poets. Nor was the society of women lacking at these gatherings. Lady
Mary Wortley Montague, the wittiest woman in England, was often
there, until her bitter quarrel with the poet; the grim old Duchess
of Marlborough appeared once or twice in Pope's last years; and the
Princess of Wales came with her husband to inspire the leaders of the
opposition to the hated Walpole and the miserly king. And from first
to last, the good angel of the place was the blue-eyed,
sweet-tempered Patty Blount, Pope's best and dearest friend. Not long
after the completion of the Iliad, Pope undertook to edit
Shakespeare, and completed the work in 1724. The edition is, of
course, quite superseded now, but it has its place in the history of
Shakespearean studies as the first that made an effort, though
irregular and incomplete, to restore the true text by collation and
conjecture. It has its place, too, in the story of Pope's life, since
the bitter criticism which it received, all the more unpleasant to
the poet since it was in the main true, was one of the principal
causes of his writing the Dunciad. Between the publication of his
edition of Shakespeare, however, and the appearance of the Dunciad,
Pope resolved to complete his translation of Homer, and with the
assistance of a pair of friends, got out a version of the Odyssey in
1725. Like the Iliad, this was published by subscription, and as in
the former case the greatest men in England were eager to show their
appreciation of the poet by filling up his lists. Sir Robert Walpole,
the great Whig statesman, took ten copies, and Harley, the fallen
Tory leader, put himself, his wife, and his daughter down for
sixteen. Pope made, it is said, about £3700 by this work.In
1726, Swift visited Pope and encouraged him to complete a satire
which he seems already to have begun on the dull critics and hack
writers of the day. For one cause or another its publication was
deferred until 1728, when it appeared under the title of the Dunciad.
Here Pope declared open war upon his enemies. All those who had
attacked his works, abused his character, or scoffed at his personal
deformities, were caricatured as ridiculous and sometimes disgusting
figures in a mock epic poem celebrating the accession of a new
monarch to the throne of Dullness. The Dunciad is little read to-day
except by professed students of English letters, but it made,
naturally enough, a great stir at the time and vastly provoked the
wrath of all the dunces whose names it dragged to light. Pope has
often been blamed for stooping to such ignoble combat, and in
particular for the coarseness of his abuse, and for his bitter jests
upon the poverty of his opponents. But it must be remembered that no
living writer had been so scandalously abused as Pope, and no writer
that ever lived was by nature so quick to feel and to resent insult.
The undoubted coarseness of the work is in part due to the gross
license of the times in speech and writing, and more particularly to
the influence of Swift, at this time predominant over Pope. And in
regard to Pope's trick of taunting his enemies with poverty, it must
frankly be confessed that he seized upon this charge as a ready and
telling weapon. Pope was at heart one of the most charitable of men.
In the days of his prosperity he is said to have given away one
eighth of his income. And he was always quick to succor merit in
distress; he pensioned the poet Savage and he tried to secure
patronage for Johnson. But for the wretched hack writers of the
common press who had barked against him he had no mercy, and he
struck them with the first rod that lay ready to his hands.During
his work on the Dunciad, Pope came into intimate relations with
Bolingbroke, who in 1725 had returned from his long exile in France
and had settled at Dawley within easy reach of Pope's villa at
Twickenham. Bolingbroke was beyond doubt one of the most brilliant
and stimulating minds of his age. Without depth of intellect or
solidity of character, he was at once a philosopher, a statesman, a
scholar, and a fascinating talker. Pope, who had already made his
acquaintance, was delighted to renew and improve their intimacy, and
soon came wholly under the influence of his splendid friend. It is
hardly too much to say that all the rest of Pope's work is directly
traceable to Bolingbroke. The Essay on Man was built up on the
precepts of Bolingbroke's philosophy; the Imitations of Horace were
undertaken at Bolingbroke's suggestion; and the whole tone of Pope's
political and social satire during the years from 1731 to 1738
reflects the spirit of that opposition to the administration of
Walpole and to the growing influence of the commercial class, which
was at once inspired and directed by Bolingbroke. And yet it is
exactly in the work of this period that we find the best and with
perhaps one exception, the Essay on Man, the most original, work of
Pope. He has obtained an absolute command over his instrument of
expression. In his hands the heroic couplet sings, and laughs, and
chats, and thunders. He has turned from the ignoble warfare with the
dunces to satirize courtly frivolity and wickedness in high places.
And most important of all to the student of Pope, it is in these last
works that his personality is most clearly revealed. It has been well
said that the best introduction to the study of Pope, the man, is to
get the Epistle to Arbuthnot by heart.Pope gradually
persuaded himself that all the works of these years, the Essay on
Man, the Satires, Epistles, and Moral Essays, were but parts of one
stupendous whole. He told Spence in the last years of his life:
"I had once thought of
completing my ethic work in four books. — The first, you know, is
on the Nature of Man [the Essay on Man]; the second would have been
on knowledge and its limits — here would have come in an Essay on
Education, part of which I have inserted in the Dunciad [i.e. in the
Fourth Book, published in 1742]. The third was to have treated of
Government, both ecclesiastical and civil — and this was what
chiefly stopped my going on. I could not have said what I would have
said without provoking every church on the face of the earth; and I
did not care for living always in boiling water. — This part would
have come into my Brutus [an epic poem which Pope never completed],
which is planned already. The fourth would have been on Morality; in
eight or nine of the most concerning branches of it."
It is difficult, if not impossible,
to believe that Pope with his irregular methods of work and illogical
habit of thought had planned so vast and elaborate a system before he
began its execution. It is far more likely that he followed his old
method of composing on the inspiration of the moment, and produced
the works in question with little thought of their relation or
interdependence. But in the last years of his life, when he had made
the acquaintance of Warburton, and was engaged in reviewing and
perfecting the works of this period, he noticed their general
similarity in form and spirit, and, possibly under Warburton's
influence, conceived the notion of combining and supplementing them
to form that "Greater Essay on Man" of which he spoke to
Spence, and of which Warburton himself has given us a detailed
account.Warburton, a wide-read, pompous, and polemical
clergyman, had introduced himself to the notice of Pope by a defense
of the philosophical and religious principles of the Essay on Man. In
spite of the influence of the free-thinking Bolingbroke, Pope still
remained a member of the Catholic church and sincerely believed
himself to be an orthodox, though liberal, Christian, and he had, in
consequence, been greatly disconcerted by a criticism of his poem
published in Switzerland and lately translated into English. Its
author, Pierre de Crousaz, maintained, and with a considerable degree
of truth, that the principles of Pope's poem if pushed to their
logical conclusion were destructive to religion and would rank their
author rather among atheists than defenders of the faith. The very
word "atheist" was at that day sufficient to put the man to
whom it was applied beyond the pale of polite society, and Pope, who
quite lacked the ability to refute in logical argument the attack of
de Crousaz, was proportionately delighted when Warburton came forward
in his defense, and in a series of letters asserted that Pope's whole
intention was to vindicate the ways of God to man, and that de
Crousaz had mistaken his purpose and misunderstood his language.
Pope's gratitude to his defender knew no bounds; he declared that
Warburton understood the Essay better than he did himself; he
pronounced him the greatest critic he ever knew, secured an
introduction to him, introduced him to his own rich and influential
friends, in short made the man's fortune for him outright. When the
University of Oxford hesitated to give Warburton, who had never
attended a university, the degree of D.D., Pope declined to accept
the degree of D.C.L. which had been offered him at the same time, and
wrote the Fourth Book of the Dunciad to satirize the stupidity of the
university authorities. In conjunction with Warburton he proceeded
further to revise the whole poem, for which his new friend wrote
notes and a ponderous introduction, and made the capital mistake of
substituting the frivolous, but clever, Colley Gibber, with whom he
had recently become embroiled, for his old enemy, Theobald, as the
hero. And the last year of his life was spent in getting out new
editions of his poems accompanied by elaborate commentaries from the
pen of Warburton.In the spring of 1744, it was evident that
Pope was failing fast. In addition to his other ailments he was now
attacked by an asthmatical dropsy, which no efforts of his physicians
could remove. Yet he continued to work almost to the last, and
distributed copies of his Ethic Epistles to his friends about three
weeks before his death, with the smiling remark that like the dying
Socrates he was dispensing his morality among his friends. His mind
began to wander; he complained that he saw all things as through a
curtain, and told Spence once "with a smile of great pleasure
and with the greatest softness" that he had seen a vision. His
friends were devoted in their attendance. Bolingbroke sat weeping by
his chair, and on Spence's remarking how Pope with every rally was
always saying something kindly of his friends, replied:
"I never in my life knew a man
that had so tender a heart for his particular friends, or a more
general friendship for mankind. I have known him these thirty years;
and value myself more for that man's love than"
— here his head dropped and his
voice broke in tears. It was noticed that whenever Patty Blount came
into the room, the dying flame of life flashed up in a momentary
glow. At the very end a friend reminded Pope that as a professed
Catholic he ought to send for a priest. The dying man replied that he
did not believe it essential, but thanked him for the suggestion.
When the priest appeared, Pope attempted to rise from his bed that he
might receive the sacrament kneeling, and the priest came out from
the sick room "penetrated to the last degree with the state of
mind in which he found his penitent, resigned and wrapt up in the
love of God and man." The hope that sustained Pope to the end
was that of immortality.
"I am so certain of the soul's
being immortal," he whispered, almost with his last breath,
"that I seem to feel it within me, as it were by intuition."
He died on the evening of May 30, so
quietly that his friends hardly knew that the end had come. He was
buried in Twickenham Church, near the monument he had erected to his
parents, and his coffin was carried to the grave by six of the
poorest men of the parish.It is plain even from so slight a
sketch as this that the common conception of Pope as "the wicked
wasp of Twickenham," a bitter, jealous, and malignant spirit, is
utterly out of accord with the facts of his life. Pope's faults of
character lie on the surface, and the most perceptible is that which
has done him most harm in the eyes of English-speaking men. He was by
nature, perhaps by training also, untruthful. If he seldom stooped to
an outright lie, he never hesitated to equivocate; and students of
his life have found that it is seldom possible to take his word on
any point where his own works or interests were concerned. I have
already attempted to point out the probable cause of this defect; and
it is, moreover, worth while to remark that Pope's manifold intrigues
and evasions were mainly of the defensive order. He plotted and
quibbled not so much to injure others as to protect himself. To
charge Pope with treachery to his friends, as has sometimes been
done, is wholly to misunderstand his character.Another flaw,
one can hardly call it a vice, in Pope's character was his constant
practice of considering everything that came in his way as copy. It
was this which led him to reclaim his early letters from his friends,
to alter, rewrite, and redate them, utterly unconscious of the
trouble which he was preparing for his future biographers. The
letters, he thought, were good reading but not so good as he could
make them, and he set to work to improve them with all an artist's
zeal, and without a trace of a historian's care for facts. It was
this which led him to embody in his description of a rich fool's
splendid house and park certain unmistakable traces of a living
nobleman's estate and to start in genuine amazement and regret when
the world insisted on identifying the nobleman and the fool. And when
Pope had once done a good piece of work, he had all an artist's
reluctance to destroy it. He kept bits of verse by him for years and
inserted them into appropriate places in his poems. This habit it was
that brought about perhaps the gravest charge that has ever been made
against Pope, that of accepting £1000 to suppress a satiric portrait
of the old Duchess of Marlborough, and yet of publishing it in a
revision of a poem that he was engaged on just before his death. The
truth seems to be that Pope had drawn this portrait in days when he
was at bitter enmity with the Duchess, and after the reconcilement
that took place, unwilling to suppress it entirely, had worked it
over, and added passages out of keeping with the first design, but
pointing to another lady with whom he was now at odds. Pope's
behavior, we must admit, was not altogether creditable, but it was
that of an artist reluctant to throw away good work, not that of a
ruffian who stabs a woman he has taken money to spare.Finally
Pope was throughout his life, and notably in his later years, the
victim of an irritable temper and a quick, abusive tongue. His
irritability sprang in part, we may believe, from his physical
sufferings, even more, however, from the exquisitely sensitive heart
which made him feel a coarse insult as others would a blow. And of
the coarseness of the insults that were heaped upon Pope no one
except the careful student of his life can have any conception. His
genius, his morals, his person, his parents, and his religion were
overwhelmed in one indiscriminate flood of abuse. Too high spirited
to submit tamely to these attacks, too irritable to laugh at them, he
struck back, and his weapon was personal satire which cut like a whip
and left a brand like a hot iron. And if at times, as in the case of
Addison, Pope was mistaken in his object and assaulted one who was in
no sense his enemy, the fault lies not so much in his alleged malice
as in the unhappy state of warfare in which he lived.Over
against the faults of Pope we may set more than one noble
characteristic. The sensitive heart and impulsive temper that led him
so often into bitter warfare, made him also most susceptible to
kindness and quick to pity suffering. He was essentially of a tender
and loving nature, a devoted son, and a loyal friend, unwearied in
acts of kindness and generosity. His ruling passion, to use his own
phrase, was a devotion to letters, and he determined as early and
worked as diligently to make himself a poet as ever Milton did. His
wretched body was dominated by a high and eager mind, and he combined
in an unparalleled degree the fiery energy of the born poet with the
tireless patience of the trained artist.But perhaps the most
remarkable characteristic of Pope is his manly independence. In an
age when almost without exception his fellow-writers stooped to
accept a great man's patronage or sold their talents into the slavery
of politics, Pope stood aloof from patron and from party. He
repeatedly declined offers of money that were made him, even when no
condition was attached. He refused to change his religion, though he
was far from being a devout Catholic, in order to secure a
comfortable place. He relied upon his genius alone for his support,
and his genius gave him all that he asked, a modest competency. His
relations with his rich and powerful friends were marked by the same
independent spirit. He never cringed or flattered, but met them on
even terms, and raised himself by merit alone from his position as
the unknown son of an humble shopkeeper to be the friend and
associate of the greatest fortunes and most powerful minds in
England. It is not too much to say that the career of a man of
letters as we know it to-day, a career at once honorable and
independent, takes its rise from the life and work of Alexander
Pope.The long controversies that have raged about Pope's rank
as a poet seem at last to be drawing to a close; and it has become
possible to strike a balance between the exaggerated praise of his
contemporaries and the reckless depreciation of romantic critics.
That he is not a poet of the first order is plain, if for no other
reason than that he never produced a work in any of the greatest
forms of poetry. The drama, the epic, the lyric, were all outside his
range. On the other hand, unless a definition of poetry be framed —
and Dr. Johnson has well remarked that "to circumscribe poetry
by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer" —
which shall exclude all gnomic and satiric verse, and so debar the
claims of Hesiod, Juvenal, and Boileau, it is impossible to deny that
Pope is a true poet. Certain qualities of the highest poet Pope no
doubt lacked, lofty imagination, intense passion, wide human
sympathy. But within the narrow field which he marked out for his own
he approaches perfection as nearly as any English poet, and Pope's
merit consists not merely in the smoothness of his verse or the
polish of separate epigrams, as is so often stated, but quite as much
in the vigor of his conceptions and the unity and careful proportion
of each poem as a whole. It is not too much to say that The Rape of
the Lock is one of the best-planned poems in any language. It is as
symmetrical and exquisitely finished as a Grecian
temple.Historically Pope represents the fullest embodiment of
that spirit which began to appear in English literature about the
middle of the seventeenth century, and which we are accustomed to
call the "classical" spirit. In essence this movement was a
protest against the irregularity and individual license of earlier
poets. Instead of far-fetched wit and fanciful diction, the classical
school erected the standards of common sense in conception and
directness in expression. And in so doing they restored poetry which
had become the diversion of the few to the possession of the many.
Pope, for example, is preeminently the poet of his time. He dealt
with topics that were of general interest to the society in which he
lived; he pictured life as he saw it about him. And this accounts for
his prompt and general acceptance by the world of his day.For
the student of English literature Pope's work has a threefold value.
It represents the highest achievement of one of the great movements
in the developments of English verse. It reflects with unerring
accuracy the life and thought of his time — not merely the outward
life of beau and belle in the days of Queen Anne, but the ideals of
the age in art, philosophy, and politics. And finally it teaches as
hardly any other body of English verse can be said to do, the
perennial value of conscious and controlling art. Pope's work lives
and will live while English poetry is read, not because of its
inspiration, imagination, or depth of thought, but by its unity of
design, vigor of expression, and perfection of finish — by those
qualities, in short, which show the poet as an artist in verse.
Chief Dates In Pope's Life