" to disavow them. He had an ugly he says: "In my politics, I think no liking for artifice, and played a disloyal further than how to prefer the peace trick on Lord Bolingbroke, his greatest of my life, in any government under friend. He was never frank, always which I live; nor in my religion, thar. acting a part; he aped the blasé man, to preserve the peace of my conscience the impartial great artist, a contemner in any church with which I communiof the great, of kings, of poetry itself. cate. hope all churches and govern he truth is, that he thought of noth-ments are so far of God, as they are ing but his phrases, his author's reputa- rightly understood and rightly adminis tion, and "a little regard shown him tered; and where they err, or may be by the Prince of Wales melted his wrong, I leave it to God alone to mend obduracy.' When we read his cor- or reform them."* Such convictions respondence, we find that there are not do not torment a man. In reality, he more than about ten genuine letters; he did not write because he thought, but is a literary man even in the moments thought in order to write; manuscript when he opened his heart; his confiden- and the noise it makes in the world, ces are formal rhetoric; and when he when printed, was his idel; if he wrote conversed with a friend he was always verses, it was merely for the sake of thinking of the printer, who would give doing so. his effusions to the public. Through this very pretentiousness he grew awkward, and unmasked himself. One day Richardson and his father, the painter, found him reading a pamphlet that Cibber had written against him. "These things," said Pope, " are my diversion." "They sat by him while he perused it, and saw his features writhing with anguish; and young Richardson said to his father, when they returned, that he hoped to be preserved from such diversion." After all, his great cause for writing was literary vanity: he wished to be admired, and nothing more; his life was that of a coquette studying herself in a glass, painting her face, smirking, receiving compliments from any one, yet declaring that compliments weary her, that paint makes her dirty, and that she has a horror of affectation. Pope has no dash, no naturalness or manliness he has no more ideas than passions > least such ideas as a man feels if necessary to write, and in connection with which we lose thought of words. Religious controversy and party quarrels resound about him; he studiously avoids them; amidst all these shocks his chief care is to preserve his writing-desk; he is a very lukewarm Catholic, all but a deist, not well aware what deism means; and on this point he borrows from Bolingbroke ideas whose scope he cannot see, but which he thinks suitable to be put into verse. In a letter to Atterbury (1717) Boswell's Life of Johnson, ch. lxxi. 670. ↑ Carruthers' Life of Pope, ch. x. 377. This is the best training for versification Pope gave himself up to it; he was a man of leisure, his father had left him a very fair fortune; he earned a large sum by translating the Iliad and Odysse; he had an income of eight hundred pounds. He was never in the pay of a publisher; he looked from an eminence upon the beggarly authors grovelling in their free and easy life, and, calmly seated in his pretty house at Twickenham, in his grotto, or in the fine garden which he had 'imself planned, he could polish and file his writings as long as he chose. He did not fail to do so. When he had written a work, he kept it at least two years in his desk. From time to time he reread and corrected it; took counsel of his friends, then of his enemies; no new edition was unamended; he altered without wearying. His first out burst became so recast and transform ed, that it could not be recognized in the final copy. The pieces which seem least retouched are two satires, and Dodsley says that in the manuscript "almost every line was written twice over; I gave him a clean transcript, which he sent some time afterwards to me for the press, with almost every line written twice over a second time." i Dr. Johnson says: "From his attention to poetry he was never diverted. If conversation offered any thing that could be improved, he committed it to * Ibid. ch. iv. 164. ↑ Johnson, The Liver of the English Poets Alexander Pope, iil. 114. Doubtless poor Eloisa is a barbarian, nay worse, a literary barbarian; she puts down learned quotations, argu ments, tries to imitate Cicero, to ar range her periods; she could not do otherwise, writing a dead language with an acquired style; perhaps the reader would do as much if he were obliged to write to his mistress in Latin.* But how does true feeling pierce through the scholastic form! paper; if a thought, or perhaps an ex- | amongst "the happiest productions of pression, more happy than was com- the human mind;" tl at Lord Byron mon, rose to his mind, he was careful himself preferred it to the celebrated to write it; an independent distich was ode of Sappho. I read it again and preserved for an opportunity of in- am bored: this is not as it ought to be; sertion; and some little fragments but, in spite of myself, yawn, and Í have been found containing lines, or open the original letters of Eloisa to parts of lines, to be wrought upon at find the cause of my weariness. some other time." * His writing-desk had to be placed upon his bed before he rose. "Lord Oxford's domestic related that, in the dreadful winter of 1740, she was called from her bed by him four times in one night to supply him with paper, lest he should lose a thought." Swift complains that he was never at leisure for conversation, because he "had always some poetical scheme in his head." Thus nothing was lacking for the attainment of per-"Thou art the only one who can sadfect expression; the practice of a lifetime, the study of every model, an independent fortune, the company of men of the world, an immunity from turbulent passions, the absence of dominant ideas, the facility of an infant prodigy, the assiduity of an old man of letters. It seems as though he were expressly endowed with faults and good qualities, here enriched, there impoverished, at once narrowed and developed, to set in relief the classical form by the diminution of the classical depth, to present the public with a model of a worn-out and accomplished art, .to reduce to a brilliant and rigid crystal the flowing sap of an expiring literature. III. den me, console me, make me joyful. .. I should be happier and prouder to be called thy mistress than to be the lawful wife of an emperor. . . . Never, God knows, have I wished for any thing else in thee but thee. It is thee alone whom I desire; nothing that thou couldst give; not marriage, not dowry: I never dreamt of doing my own pleas ure or my own will, thou knowest it, but thine." Then come passionate words, genuine love words,f then the unrestrained words of a penitent, who says and dares every thing, because she wishes to be cured, to show her wound to her confessor, even her most shameful wound; perhaps also because in extreme agony, as in child-birth, mod esty vanishes. All this is very crude very rude; Pope has more wit than she, and how he endues her with it! In his hands she becomes an academi cian, and her letter is a repertory of literary effects. Portraits and descrip tions; she paints to Abelard the nun nery and the landscape: It is a great misfortune for a poet to know his business too well; his poetry then shows the man of business, and not the poet. I wish I could admire Pope's works of imagination, but I cannot. In vain I read the testimony of his contemporaries, and even that of the moderns, and repeat to myself that in his time he was the prince of poets; *Rev. W. Elwin, in his edition of Pope's tha. his Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard Latin letters has usually been taken for gra "The authenticity of the Works, ii. 224, says: was received with a cry of enthusi-ed, but I have a strong belief that they are a asm; that a man could not then imag- forgery.. It is far more likely that they are ine a finer expression of true passion; who speaks in the name of others with a latithe fabrication of an unconcerned romancer, that to this very day it is learned by tude which people, not entirely degraded, would heart, like the speech of Hippolyte in never adopt towards themselves. The suspr the Phèdre of Racine; that Johnson, cion is strengthened when the second party to the great literary critic, ranked it his generation, exhibits the same exceptional the correspondence, the chief philosopher of * Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets; Alexander Pope, iii. 111. + Ibid. iii. 105. depravity of taste."-TR. "Vale, unice." The grots that echo to the tinkling rills, Declamation and commonplace: she To sounds of heavenly narps she dies away And melts in visions of eternal day.” * Observe the noise of the big drum, I mean the grand contrivances, for 60 may be called all that a person says who wishes to rave and cannot; for instance, speaking to rocks and walls, praying the absent Abelard to come, fancying him present, apostrophizing grace and virtue : "O grace serene! O virtue heavenly fair And faith, our early immortality! "I come! I come! Prepare your roseate bow'rs, Celestial palms, and ever-blooming flow'rs.''t This is the final symphony with modulations of the celestial organ. I presume that Abelard cried " Bravo" when he heard it. illuminated by his presence and deso-Hearing the dead speaking to her, tell late by his absence, between the tran- ing the angels : quillity of the pure nun and the anxiety of the sinful nun, between the dream of human happiness and the dream of divine happiness. In fine, it is a bravura, with contrasts of forte and piano, variations and change of key. Eloisa makes the most of her theme, and sets herself to crowd into it all the powers and effects of her voice. Admire the crescendo, the shakes by which she ends her brilliant morceaux; to transport the hearer at the close of the portrait of the innocent nun, she says: 'How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot: Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each prayer accepted and each wish signed; But this is nothing in comparison with the art exhibited by her in every phrase. She puts ornaments into every line. Imagine an Italian singer trilling every word. O what pretty sounds! how nimbly and brilliantly they roll along, how clear, and always exquisite ! it is impossible to reproduce them in another tongue. Now it is a happy re-image, filling up a whole phrase; now a series of verses, full of symmetrical contrasts; two ordinary words set in relief by strange conjunction; an imitative rhythm completing the impres sion of the mind by the emotion of the senses; the most elegant comparisons and the most picturesque epithets; the closest style and the most ornate. Except truth, nothing is wanting. Eloisa is worse than a singer, she is an author: we look at the back of her epistle to Abelard to see if she has not written on it "For Press." Labour and rest, that equal periods keep; heav'.. Grace sts around her with serenest beams, For her, th' unfading rose of Eden blooms, Pope's Works, ed. Elwin; Eloisa to Abelard, ii. 245, l. 141-160. Eloisa to Abelard, ii. 240, 7. 51-58: "Heav'n first taught letters for some wretch's aid, Some banished lover, or some captive maid; Warm from the soul, and faithful to its fires, Pope has somewhere given a receipt for making an epic poem : take a storm a dream, five or six battles, three sacri fices, funeral games, a dozen gods in two divisions; shake together until there rises the froth of a lofty style. We have just seen the receipt for mak *Eloisa to Abelard, ii. 249, 2. 207-222. ↑ Ibid. ii. 254, l. 297–302. Ibid. 255, l. 337 vated taste. ing a love-letter. This kind of poetry | enough to transp it an artist. Certain resembles cookery; neither heart nor ly he will be aware of the influence of genius is necessary to produce it, but a the toilet, as much so as the lady her light hand, an attentive eye, and a culti- self, and will never scold her for pass ing three hours at her glass; there is poetry in elegance. He enjoys it as a picture; delights in the refinements of worldly life, the grand quiet lines of the lofty, wainscoted drawing-room, the soft reflection of the high mirrors and glittering porcelain, the careless gayety of the little sculptured Loves, locked in embrace above the mantelpiece, the silvery sound of these soft voices, buz. It seems that this kind of talent is made for light verses. It is factitious, and so are the manners of society. To make pretty speeches, to prattle with ladies, to speak elegantly of their chocolate or their fan, to jeer at fools, to criticise the last tragedy, to be good at insipid compliments or epigrams, this it see ns, is the natural employment of a mind such as this, but slight-zing scandal round the tea-table. Pope ly impassioned, very vain, a perfect master of style, as careful of his verses as a dandy of his coat. Pope wrote the Rape of the Lock and the Dunciad; his contemporaries went into ecstasies about the charm of his badinage and the precision of his raillery, and believed that he had surpassed Boileau's Lutrin" the pink of fashion," and who is comand Satires. That may well be; at all events the praise would be scanty. In Boileau there are, as a rule, two kinds of verse, as was said by a man of wit; * most of which seem to be those of a sharp schoolboy in the third class, the rest those of a good schoolboy in the upper division. Boileau wrote the second verse before the first this is why once out of four times his first verse only serves to stop a gap. Doubtless Pope had a more brilliant and adroit mechanism; but this facility of hand does not suffice to make a poet, even a poet of the boudoir. There, as elsewhere, we need genuine passion, or at least genuine taste. When we wish to paint the pretty nothings of conversation and the world, we must at least like them. We can only paint well what we love.t Is there no charming grace in the pratte and frivolity of a pretty woman? Painters, like Watteau, have spent their lives in feasting on them. A lock of hair raised by the wind, a pret arm peeping from underneath a great deal of lace, a stooping figure making the bright folds of a petticoat sparkle, and the arch, half-engaging, half-mocking smile of the pouting mouth,-these are M. Guillaume Guizot. "Liebe sei vor allen Dingen, Unser Thema wenn wir singen." hardly if at all rejoices in them; he is satirical and English amidst this amiable luxury, introduced from France. Although he is the most worldly of English poets, he is not enough so: nor is the society around him. Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who was in her time pared to Madame de Sévigné, has such a serious mind, such a decided style, such a precise judgment, and such a harsh sarcasra, that we would take her for a man. In reality the English, even Lord Chesterfield and Horace Walpole, never mastered the true tone of the salon. Pope is like them; his voice is out of tune, and then suddenly becomes biting. Every instant a harsh mockery blots out the graceful images which he began to awaken. Consider The Rape of the Lock as a whole; it is a buffoon ery in a noble style. Lord Petre had cut off a lock of hair of a fashionable beauty, Mrs. Arabella Fermor; out of this trifle the problem is to make an epic, with invocations, apostrophes, the intervention of supernatural beings, and the rest of poetic mechanism; the solemnity of style contrasts with the littleness of the events; we laugh at these bickerings as at insects quarrelling Such has always been the case in Eng. land; whenever Englishmen wish to represent social life, it is with a superficial and assumed politeness; at the bottom of their admiration there is scorn. Their insipid compliments co ceal a mental reservation; let us or serve them well, and we will see that they look upon a pretty, well-dressed and coquettish woman as a pink doll, fit to amuse people for half-an-hour by her outward show. Pope dedicates his poem to Mrs. Arabella Fermor with every kind of compliment. The truth is, he is not polite; a Frenchwoman would have sent him back his book, and advised him to learn manners; for one commendation of her beauty she would find ten sarcasms upon her frivolity. It is very pleasant to have it said: "You have the prettiest eyes in the world, but you live in the pursuit of trifles ?" Yet to this all his homage is reduced.* His complimentary emphasis, his declaration that the " ravish'd hair adds new glory to the shining sphere," † all his stock of phrases is but a parade of gallantry which betrays indelicacy and coarseness. Will she ... 493 "To Love an altar built Of twelve vast French romances, neatly gilt. We remain disappointed, not seeing "Here sighs a jar, and there a gocee-pro talks ; Men proved with child, as pow'rful fancy works, And maids turned bottles, call aloud for corks." ↑ "Stain her honour, or her new brocade, We say to ourselves now that we are Forget her pray'rs or miss a masquerade, in China; that so far from Paris and Or lose her heart, or necklace at a ball? Voltaire we must be surprised at nothNo Frenchman of the eighteenth cen- from ours, and that a Pekin mandarin ing, that these folk have ears different tury would have imagined such a compliment. At most, that bearish Rous- vastly relishes kettle-music. Finally, sean, that former lackey and Geneva we comprehend that, even in this cor moialist, might have delivered this dis-rect age and this artificial poetry, the agreeable thrust. In England it was old style of imagination exists; that it is nourished as before, by oddities and not found too rude. Mrs. Arabella Ferrior was so pleased with the poem, all culture, will never become acclimacontrasts; and that taste, in spite of that she gave away copies of it. Clearly she was not hard to please, for she tized; that incongruities, far from shockhad heard much worse compliments.ing, delight it; that it is insensible to If we read in Swift the literal transcript of a fashionable conversation, we shall see that a woman of fashion of that time could endure much before she was angry. But the strangest thing is, that this trifling is, for Frenchmen at least, no badinage at all. It is not at all like lightness or gayety. Dorat, Gresset, would have been stupefied and shocked by it. We remain cold under its most brilliant hits. Now and then at most a crack of the whip arouses us, but not to laughter. These caricatures seem strange to us, but do not amuse. The wit is no wit: all is calculated, combined, artificially prepared; we expect flashes of lightning, but at the last moment they do not descend. Thus Lord Petre, to implore propitious heaven, and every power,' men. *See his Epistle of the Characters of Wo According to Pope, this character is composed of love of pleasure and love of power. ↑ Rape of the Lock, c. v. 181, 2. 141. Ibid. c. ii. 156, 2. 107. that it needs a succession of expressive French sweetness and refinements; figures, unexpected and grinning, to pass before it; that it prefers this coarse carnival to delicate insinuations; that Pope belongs to his country, in spite of his classical polish and his studied elegances, and that his unpleasant and vigorous fancy is akin to that of Swift. We are now prepared and can enter upon his second poem, The Dunciad. We need much self-command not to throw down this masterpiece as insipid, and even disgusting. Rarely has so much talent been spent to produce greater tedium. Pope wished to be avenged on his literary enemies, and sang f Dulness, the sublime goddess of literature, "daughter of Chaos and and as her mother grave," queen of eternal Night . gross as her sire, hungry authors, who chooses for her son and favorite, first Theobald and afterwards Cibber. There he s, a * Ibid. c. ii. 153, l. 37-42. ↑ Ibid. c. iv. 169, l. 52. Pope's Works, The Dunciad, bk. i. |