ready with an answer. If Jupiter were less than
his satellites they wouldn't go round him. Pope
can make no claim to be a philosopher, ancl had
he~T3een one, Verse would have been a most'
improper vehicle to convey his speculations. HJ^nJ
Xo one willingly fights in handcuffs or wrestles <*~4Qa**M*
to music. For a man with novel truths to
promulgate, or grave moral laws to expound, to
postpone doing so until he had hitched them
into rhyme would be to insult his mission. Pope's
gifts were his wit, his swift-working mind, added
to all the cunning of the craft and mystery of com-
position. He could say things better than other
men, and hence it comes that, be he a great
poet or a small one, he is a great writer, an
English classic. What is it that constitutes a
great writer? A bold question, certainly, but
whenever anyone asks himself a question in
public you may be certain he has provided
himself with an answer. I find mine in the
writings of a distinguished neighbour of yours,
himself, though living, an English classic —
Cardinal Newman. He says* :
* Lectures and Essays on University Sutyects : Lectin*
cm Literature.
8.1 POPE.
1 1 do not claim for a great author, as such,
1 any great depth of thought, or breadth of
1 view, or philosophy, or sagacity, or knowledge
'of human nature, or experience of human life
1 — though these additional gifts he may have,
1 and the more he has of them the greater he is,
' — but I ascribe to him, as his characteristic
•gift, in a large sense, the faculty of expression.
' He is master of the two-fold Xoyoc, the thought
1 and the word, distinct but inseparable from
' each other. . . . He always has the right word
' for the right idea, and never a word too much.
' If he is brief it is because few words suffice ;
1 if he is lavish of them, still each word has its
'mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous
'march of his elocution. He expresses what all
1 feel, but all cannot say, and his sayings pass
'into proverbs amongst his people, and his
' phrases become household words and idioms
' of their daily speech, which is tessellated with
'the rich fragments of his language, as we see
' in foreign lands the marbles of Roman grandeur
' worked into the walls and pavements of modern
' palaces.' Pope satisfies this definition. He has
been dead one hundred and forty-two years;
yet, next to Shakespeare, who has been dead
two hundred and seventy years, and who was
POPE. Si
nearer to Pope than Pope is to us, he is the
most quoted of English poets, the one who has
most enriched our common speech. Horace
used, but has long ceased, to be the poet of
Parliament ; for Mr. Gladstone, who, more than
any other, has kept alive in Parliament the
scholarly traditions of the past, has never been
very Horatian, preferring, whenever the dignity
of the occasion seemed to demand Latin, the
long roll of the hexameter, something out of
Virgil or Lucretius. The new generation of
honourable members might not unprofitably
turn their attention to Pope. Think how, at
all events, the labour members would applaud,
not with 'a sad civility,' but with downright
cheers, a quotation they actually understood.
Pope is seen at his best in his satires and
epistles, and in the mock-heroic. To say that
the Rape of the Lock is the best mock-heroic
poem in the language is to say nothing; to say
that it is the best in the world is to say more
than my reading warrants ; but to say that it
and Paradise Regained are the only two fault-
less poems, of any length, in English is to say
enough.
The satires are savage — perhaps satires should
be ; but Pope's satires are sometimes what satires
6
S2 POPE.
should never be — shrill. Dr. Johnson is more
to my mind as a sheer satirist than Pope, for
in satire character tells more than in any other
form of verse. We want a personality behind —
a strong, gloomy, brooding personality ; soured
and savage if you will — nay, as soured and
savage as you like, but spiteful never.
Pope became rather by the backing of his
friends than from any other cause a party man.
Party feeling ran high during the first Georges,
and embraced things now outside its ambit —
the theatre, for example, and the opera. You
remember how excited politicians got over
Addison's Cafo, which, as the work of a Whig,
and appearing at a critical time, was thought to
be full of a wicked wit and a subtle innuendo
future ages have failed to discover amidst its
obvious dulness. Pope, who was not then con-
nected with either party, wrote the prologue,
and in one of the best letters ever written to
nobody tells the story of the first night.
1 The numerous and violent claps of the Whig
' party, on the one side the theatre, were echoed
'back by the Tories on the other, while the
1 author sweated behind the scenes with concern
1 to find their applause proceeded more from
'the hand than the head. This was the case
POPE. fc 3
'too of the prologue-writer, who was clapped
'into a stanch Whig, sore against his will, at
'almost every two lines. I believe that you
• have heard that, after all the applause of the
1 opposite faction, my Lord Bolingbroke sent
'for Booth, who played Cato, into the box
' between one of the acts, and presented him
'with fifty guineas, in acknowledgment, as he
'expressed it, for his defending the cause of
* liberty so well against a perpetual dictator.
'The Whigs are unwilling to be distanced this
' way, as it is said, and, therefore, design a pre-
' sent to the said Cato very speedily. In the
'meantime they are getting ready as good a
1 sentence as the former on their side. So, be-
' twixt them, it is probable that Cato, as Dr.
'Garth expressed it, may have something to live
'upon after he dies.'
Later on music was dragged into the fray.
The Court was all for Handel and the Germans;
the Prince of Wales and the Tory nobility
affected the Italian opera. The Whigs went
to the Haymarket; the Tories to the Opera
House in Lincoln's Inn Field. In this latter
strife Pope took small part ; for, notwithstand-
ing his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, he hated music
with an entire sincerity. He also affected to
6—2
84 POPE.
hate the drama; but some have thought this
accounted for by the fact that, early in his
career, he was damned for the farce of Three
Hours after lyfarriage, which, after the fashion
of our own days, he concocted with another,
the co-author in this case being a wit of no less
calibre than Gay, the author of The Beggars'
Opera. The astonished audience bore it as best
they might till the last act, when the two lovers,
having first inserted themselves respectively into
the skins of a mummy and a crocodile, talk at
one another across the boards ; then they rose
in their rage, and made an end of that farce.
Their yells were doubtless still in Pope's ears
when, years afterwards, he wrote the fine lines — â–
1 While all its throats the gallery extends
And all the thunder of the pit ascends,
Loud as the wolves on Orca's stormy steep
Howl to the roarings of the northern deep.'
Pope, as we have said, became a partisan,
and so had his hands full of ready-made quarrels;
but his period was certainly one that demanded
a satirist. Perhaps most periods do ; but I am
content to repeat, his did. Satire like Pope's is
essentially modish, and requires a restricted
\ range. Were anyone desirous of satirizing
POPE. 85
humanity at large I should advise him to check
his noble rage, and, at all events, to begin with
his next-door neighbour, who is almost certain
to resent it, which humanity will not do. This
was Pope's method. It was a corrupt set
amongst whom he moved. The gambling in
the South Sea stock had been prodigious, and
high and low, married and single, town and
country, Protestant and Catholic, Whig and
Tory, took part in it. One could gamble in
that stock. The mania began in February
1720, and by the end of May the price of
.£100 stock was up to ^340. In July and
August it was ,£950, and even touched ^1,000.
In the middle of September it was down to
^590, and before the end of the year it had
dropped to ^125. Pope himself bought stock
when it stood so low as ^104, but he had
never the courage to sell, and consequently lost,
according to his own account, half his worldly
possessions. The Prime Minister, Sir Robert
Walpole, also bought stock, but he sold — as did
his Most Gracious Majesty the King — at ;£ 1,000.
The age was also a scandalous, ill-living age,
and Pope, who was a most confirmed gossip
and tale-bearer, picked up all that was going.
The details of every lawsuit of a personal
86 POPE.
character were at his finger-ends. Whoevet
starved a sister, or forged a will, or saved his
candle-ends, made a fortune dishonestly, or lost
one disgracefully, or was reported to do so, be
he citizen or courtier, noble duke or plump
alderman, Mr. Pope was sure to know all about
it, and as likely as not to put it into his next
satire. Living, as the poet did, within easy dis-
tance of London, he always turned up in a
crisis as regularly as a porpoise in a storm, so at
least writes a noble friend. This sort of thing
naturally led to quarrels, and the shocking in-
completeness of this lecture stands demonstrated
by the fact that, though I have almost done, I
have as yet said nothing abort Pope's quarrels,
which is nearly as bad as writing about St. Paul
and leaving out his journeys. Pope's quarrels
are celebrated. His quarrel with Mr. Addison,
culminating in the celebrated description, almost
every line of which is now part and parcel of
the English language; his quarrel with Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu, whom he satirized in
the most brutal lines ever written by man of
woman ; his quarrel with Lord Hervey ; his
quarrel with the celebrated Sarah, Duchess of
Marlborough, ought not to be dimissed so lightly,
but what can I do? From the Duchess of
POPE. 87
Marlborough Pope is said to have received a
sum of money, sometimes stated at ;£ 1,000
and sometimes at ,£3,000, for consenting to
suppress his description of her as Atossa, which,
none the less, he published. I do not believe
the story ; money passed between the parties
and went to Miss Martha Blount, but it must
have been for some other consideration. Sarah
Jennings was no fool, and loved money far too
well to give it away without security ; and how
possibly could she hope by a cash payment to
erase from the tablets of a poet's memory lines
dictated by his hate, or bind by the law of
honour a man capable of extorting blackmail ?
Then Pope quarrelled most terribly with the
elder Miss Blount, who, he said, used to beat
her mother ; then he quarrelled with the mother
because she persisted in living with the daughter
and pretending to be fond of her. As for his
quarrels with the whole tribe of poor authors,
are they not writ large in the four books of the
Ditnciad? Mr. Swinburne is indeed able tc
find in some, at all events, of these quarrels a
species of holy war, waged, as he says, in lan-
guage which is at all events strong, ' against al'
'the banded bestialities of all dunces and all
1 dastards, all blackguardly blockheads and all
1 blockheaded blackguards.'
88 POPE.
I am sorry to be unable to allow myself to be
wound up in Mr. Swinburne's bucket to the
height of his argument. There are two kinds of
quarrels, the noble and the ignoble. When
John Milton, weary and depressed for a moment
in the battle he was fighting in the cause of an
enlightened liberty and an instructed freedom,
exclaims, with the sad prophet Jeremy, ' Woe is
'me, my mother, that thou hast borne me, a
'man of strife and contention,' we feel the
sublimity of the quotation, which would not be
quite the case were the words uttered by an
Irishman returning home with a broken head
from Donnybrook Fair. The Dimciad was
quite uncalled-for. Even supposing that we
admit that Pope was not the aggressor :
' The noblest answer unto such
Is kindly silence when they brawl.'
But it is, to say the least of it, doubtful whether
Pope did not begin brawling first. Swift, whose
misanthropy was genuine, and who begged Pope
whenever he thought of the world to gi/e it
another lash on his (the Dean's) account, saw
clearly the danger of Pope's method, and wrote
to him : ' Take care the bad poets do not out-
' wit you as they have done the good ones in
POPE. 89
'every age ; whom they have provoked to trans-
' mit their names to posterity. Maevius is as
'well known as Virgil, and Gildon will be as
' well known as you if his name gets into your
' verses j and as for the difference between good
'and bad fame, it is a mere trifle.' The advice
was far too good to be taken. But what has
happened ? The petty would-be Popes, but for the
real Pope, would have been entirely forgotten.
As it is, only their names survive in the index
to the Dunciad ; their indecencies and dastardly
blockheadisms are as dead as Queen Anne ; and
if the historian or the moralist seeks an illustra-
tion of the coarseness and brutality of their
style, he finds it only too easily, not in the works
of the dead dunces, but in the pages of their
persecutor. Pope had none of the grave pur-
pose which makes us, at all events, partially
sympathize with Ben Jonson in his quarrels with
the poetasters of his day. It is a mere toss-up
whose name you may find in the Dunciad — a
miserable scribbler's or a resplendent scholar's ;
a tasteless critic's or an immortal wit's. A
satirist who places Richard Bentley and Daniel
Defoe amongst the Dunces must be content to
abate his pretensions to be regarded as a social
purge.
9Q
POPE.
Men and women, we can well believe, went
in terror of little Mr. Pope. Well they might,
for he made small concealment of their names,
and even such as had the luck to escape obvious
recognition have been hoisted into infamy by
the untiring labours of subsequent commenta-
tors. It may, perhaps, be still open to doubt
who was the Florid Youth referred to in the
Epilogue to the Satires :
'And how did, pray, the Florid Youth offend
Whose speech you took and gave it to a friend ?'
Bowles said it was Lord Hervey, and that the
adjective is due to his lordship's well-known
practice of painting himself; but Mr. Croker,
who knew everything, and was in the habit of
contradicting the Duke of Wellington about the
battle of Waterloo, says, ' Certainly not. The
' Florid Youth was young Henry Fox.'
Sometimes, indeed, in our hours of languor
and dejection, when
1 The heart is sick,
And all the wheels of being slow,'
the question forces itself upon us, What can it
matter who the Florid Youth was, and who
".ares how he offended ? But this questioning
POPE. 91
spirit must be checked. â– The proper study of
* mankind is man,' and that title cannot be
denied even to a florid youth. Still, as I was
saying, people did not like it at the time, and
the then Duke of Argyll said, in his place in the
House of Lords, that if anybody so much as
named him in an invective, he would first run
him through the body, and then throw himself
— not out of the window, as one was charitably
hoping — but on a much softer place — the con-
sideration of their Lordship's House. Some
persons of quality, of less truculent aspect than
McCallum More, thought to enlist the poet's
services, and the Duchess of Buckingham got
him to write an epitaph on her deceased son —
a feeble lad — to which transaction the poet is
thought to allude in the pleasing lines,
1 But random praise— the task can ne'er be done,
Each mother asks it for her booby son.'
Mr. Alderman Barber asked it for himself, and
was willing — so at least it was reported — to pay
for it at the handsome figure of ^4,000 for a
single couplet. Pope, however, who was not
mercenary, declined to gratify the alderman,
who by his will left the poet a legacy of £ 100,
possibly hoping by this benefaction, if he could
92 POPE.
not be praised in his lifetime, at all events to
escape posthumous abuse. If this were his
wish it was gratified, and the alderman sleeps
unsung.
Pope greatly enjoyed the fear he excited.
With something of exultation he sings : —
'Yes, I am proud : I must be proud to see
Men, not afraid of God, afraid of me ;
Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne,
Yet touched and shamed by ridicule alone.
O sacred weapon ! left for Truth's defence,
Sole dread of folly, vice, and insolence !
To all but heaven-directed hands denied,
The Muse may give thee, but the gods must guide i
Reverent I touch thee, but with honest zeal,
To rouse the watchmen of the public weal,
To Virtue's work provoke the tardy Hall
And goad the prelate slumb'ring in his stall.
Ye tinsel insects ! whom a court maintains,
That counts your beauties only by your stains,
Spin all your cobwebs o'er the eye of day,
The Muse's wing shall brush you all away.
All his grace preaches, all his lordship sings,
All that makes saints of queens, and gods of kings, —
All, all but truth drops dead-born from the press,
Like the last gazette, or the last address.'
The poet himself was very far from being
invulnerable, and he writhed at every sarcasm.
There was one of his contemporaries of whom
POPE. 93
he stood in mortal dread, but whose name he
was too frightened even to mention. It is easy
to guess who this was. It was Hogarth, who in
one of his caricatures had depicted Pope as a
hunchback, whitewashing Burlington House.
Pope deemed this the most grievous insult of
his life, but he said nothing about it; the spiteful
pencil proving more than master of the poisoned
pen.
Pope died on May 30th, 1744, bravely and
cheerfully enough. His doctor was offering him
one day the usual encouragements, telling him
his breath was easier, and so on, when a friend
entered, to whom the poet exlaimed, ' Here
1 1 am, dying of a hundred good symptoms.'
In Spence's Anecdotes there is another story,
pitched in a higher key : ' Shortly before his
1 death, he said to me, " What's that ?" pointing
1 into the air with a very steady regard, and then
1 looked down on me and said, with a smile of
'great pleasure, and with the greatest softness,
' "'Twas a vision." ' It may have been so. At
the very last he consented to allow a priest to be
sent for, who attended and administered to the
dying man the last sacraments of the Church.
The spirit in which he received them cannot be
pronounced religious. As Cardinal Newman
94
POPE.
has observed, Pope was an unsatisfactory
Catholic.
Pope died in his enemies' day.
Dr. Arbuthnot, who was acknowledged by all
his friends to have been the best man who ever
lived, be the second-best who he might, had
predeceased the poet ; and it should be remem-
bered, before we take upon ourselves the task of
judging a man we never saw, that Dr. Arbuthnot,
who was as shrewd as he was good, had for
Pope that warm personal affection we too rarely
notice nowadays between men of mature years.
Swift said of Arbuthnot : ' Oh ! if the world had
' but a dozen Arbuthnots in it I would burn my
Travels' This may be doubted without damage
to the friendly testimony. The terrible Dean
himself, whose azure eyes saw through most
pretences, loved Pope ; but Swift was now worse
than dead — he was mad, dying a-top, like the
shivered tree he once gazed upon with horror
and gloomy forebodings of impending doom.
Many men must have been glad when they
read in their scanty journals that Mr. Pope lay
dead at his villa in Twickenham. They breathed
the easier for the news. Personal satire may be
a legitimate, but it is an ugly weapon. Trje
Muse often gives what the gods do not guide;
POPE. 95
and though we may be willing that our faults
should be scourged, we naturally like to be sure
that we owe our sore backs to the blackness of
our guilt, and not merely to the fact that we
have the proper number of syllables to our
names, or because we occasionally dine with an
enemy of our scourger.
But living as we do at a convenient distance
from Mr. Pope, we may safely wish his days had
been prolonged, not necessarily to those of his
mother, but to the Psalmist's span, so that he
might have witnessed the dawn of a brighter
day. 1744 was the nadir of the eighteenth cen-
tury. With Macbeth the dying Pope might
have exclaimed, —
' Renown and grace is dead ;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left in the vault to brag of.'
The feats of arms that have made the first
Ministry of the elder Pitt for ever glorious would
have appealed to Pope's better nature, and made
him forget the scandals of the court and the
follies of the town. Who knows but they might
have stirred him, for he was not wholly without
the true poet's prophetic gift, which dreams of
things to come, to foretell, in that animated and
96 POPE.
animating style of his, which has no rival save
glorious John Dryden's, the expansion of
England, and how, in far-off summers he should
never see, English maidens, living under the
Southern Cross, should solace their fluttering
hearts before laying themselves down to sleep
with some favourite bit from his own Eloisa to
Abelard? Whether, in fact, maidens in those
latitudes do read Eloisa before blowing out
their candles I cannot say ; but Pope, I warrant,
would have thought they would. And they
might do worse — and better.
Both as a poet and a man Pope had many
negations.
' Of love, that sways the sun and all the stars,'
he knew absolutely nothing. Even of the
lesser light,
' The eternal moon of love,
Under whose motions life's dull billows move,*
he knew but little.
His Eloisa, splendid as is its diction, and
vigorous though be the portrayal of the miser-
able creature to whom the poem relates, most
certainly lacks 'a gracious somewhat,' whilst no
less certainly is it marred by a most unfeeling
coarseness. A poem about love it may be — a
POPE. 97
l ove-poem it is n oj. Of the ' wild benefit of
* nature,' —
' The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills,'
Pope had small notion, though there is just a
whiff of Wordsworth in an observation he once
hazarded, that a tree is a more poetical object
than a prince in his coronation robes. His
taste in landscape gardening was honoured with
the approbation of Horace Walpole, and he
spent ;£i,ooo upon a grotto, which incurred the
ridicule of Johnson. Of that indescribable
something, that 'greatness' which causes Dryden
to uplift a lofty head from the deep pit of his
corruption, neither Pope's character nor his style
bears any trace. But still, both as a poet and a
man we must give place, and even high place, to
Pope. About the poetry there can be no ques-
tion. A man with his wit, and faculty of expres-
sion, and infinite painstaking, is not to be evicted
from his ancient homestead in the affections and
memories of his people by a rabble of critics, or
even a. posse of poets. As for the man, he was
ever eager and interested in life. Beneath all
his faults — for which he had more excuse than
a whole congregation of the righteous need ever
7
98 POPE.
hope to muster for their own shortcomings — we
recognise humanity, and we forgive much to
humanity, knowing how much need there is for
humanity to forgive us. Indifference, known by
its hard heart and its callous temper, is the only
unpardonable sin. Pope never committed it.
He had much to put up with. We have much
to put up with — in him. He has given enormous
pleasure to generations of men, and will continue
so to do. We can never give him any pleasure.
The least we can do is to smile pleasantly as we
replace him upon his shelf, and say, as we truth-
fully may, 'There was a great deal of human
1 nature in Alexander Pope.'
DR. JOHNSON.
If we should ever take occasion to say of Dr.
Johnson's Preface to Shakspeare what he him-
self said of a similar production of the poet
Rowe, 'that it does not discover much profundity
1 or penetration,' we ought in common fairness
always to add that nobody else has ever written
about Shakspeare one-half so entertainingly.
If this statement be questioned, let the doubter,
before reviling me, re-read the preface, and if,
after he has done so, he still demurs, we shall
be content to withdraw the observation, which,
indeed, has only been made for the purpose of
introducing a quotation from the Preface itself.
In that document, Dr. Johnson, with his un-
rivalled stateliness, writes as follows : — ' The
'poet of whose works I have undertaken the
1 revision may now begin to assume the dignity