POPE
THERE was born in eighteenth century England a pale little diseased wretch of a bov. Since it was evident that he would never be fit for any healthy and vigorous trade, and that he must all his life be sickly and burdensome to himself, and since it is the usual way of such unhappy beings to add to their unhappiness by their own perversities of choice, he naturally became a poet. And after living for long in a certain miserable state called glory, reviled and worshipped and laughed at and courted, despised by the women he loved, very ill looked after, amid the fear and mahgnity of many and the aife6lion of very few, the wizened little suffering monstrosity died, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, by way of encouraging others to follow in his footsteps. And though a large number of others have done so with due and proper misfortune, in all the melancholy line there is, perhaps, no such destined a wretch as Alexander Pope. What fame can do to still the cravings of such a poor prodigal of song, in the beggarly raiment of his tattered body, that it did for him. The husks of renown he had in plenty, and had them all his life, as no other poet has had. But Voltaire testified that the author of that famous piece of philosophy, ' Whatever is, is right,' was the most miserable man he had ever known.
This king of the eighteenth century is still the king of the eighteenth century by general consent. Dryden was a greater poet, meo judicio, but he did not represent the eighteenth century so well as Pope. All that was elegant and airy in the polished artificiality of that age reaches its apotheosis in the Rape of the Lock. It is Pope's masterpiece, a Watteau in verse. The poetry of manners could no further go than in this boudoir epic, unmatched in any literature. It is useless, I may here say, to renew the old dispute whether Pope was a poet. Call his verse poetry or what you will, it is work in verse which could not have been done in prose, and, of its kind, never equalled. Then the sylph machinery in the Rape of the Lock is undoubted work of fancy: the fairyland of powder and patches, A Midsummer Nighfs Dream seen through chocolate-fumes. The Essay on Ma?i is naught to us nowadays, as a whole. It has brilliant artificial passages. It has homely aphorisms such as only Pope and Shakespeare could produce — the quintessence of pointed common sense: many of them have passed into the language, and are put down, by three out of five who quote them, to Shakespeare, But, as a piece of reasoning in verse, the Essay on Man is utterly inferior to Dryden's Ht7id ajid Panther. Even that brilliant achievement could not escape the doom which hangs over the didaftic poem pure and simple; and certain, therefore, was the fate of the Essay on Man,
The Dunciad De Qulncey ranked even above the Rape of the Lock. At my peril I venture to question a judgement backed by all the ages. The superb satire of parts of the poem I admit; I admit the exceedingly fine close, in which Pope touched a height he never touched before or after; I admit the completeness of the scheme. But from that completeness comes the essential defeat of the poem. He adapted the scheme from Dryden's MacFlccknoe. But Dryden's satire is at once complete and succinft: Pope has built upon the scheme an edifice greater than it will bear; has extended a witty and ingenious idea to a portentous extent at which it ceases to be amusing. The mock solemnity of Dryden's idea becomes a ver)' real and dull solemnity when it is extended to liberal epic proportions. A serious epic is apt to nod, with the force of a Milton behind it; an epic satire fairly goes to sleep. A pleasantry in several books is past a pleasantry. And it is bolstered out with a great deal which is sheer greasy scurrility. The mock-heroic games of the poets are in large part as dully dirty as the waters into which Pope makes them plunge.
If the poem had been half as long, it might have been a masterpiece. As it is, unless v/e are to reckon masterpieces by avoirdupois weight, or to assign undue value to mere symmetry of scheme, I think we must look for Pope's satirical masterpiece elsewhere. Not in the satire on women, where Pope seems hardly to have his heart in his work; but in the imitations from Horace, those generally known as Pope's Satires, Here he is at his very best and tersest. They are as brilliant as anything in the Dunciad, and they are brilliant right through; the mordant pen never flags. It matters not that they are imitated from Horace. They gain by it: their limits are circumscribed, their lines laid down, and Pope writes the better for having these limits set him, this tissue on which to work. Not a whit does he lose in essential originality: nowhere is he so much himself. It is very different from Horace, say the critics. Surely that is exactly the thing for which to thank poetry and praise Pope. It has not the pleasant urbane good humour of the Horatian spirit. No, it has the spirit of Pope — and satire is the gainer. Horace is the more charming companion; Pope is the greater satirist. In place of an echo of Horace (and no verse translation was ever anything but feeble which attempted merely to echo the original), we have a new spirit in satire; a fine series of English satirical poems, which in their kind are unapproached by the Roman, and in his kind wisely avoid the attempt to approach him. Satires after Horace would have <k»been a better title than Imitations; for less imitative poems in essence were never written. These and the Rape of the Lock are Pope's finest title to fame. The Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady ha.3 at least one part v/hich shows a pathos little to have been surmised from his later work; and so, perhaps (in a much less degree, I think), have fragments of the once famous Eloisa to Abelard. But the Pastorals^ and the Windsor Forest^ and the Ode on St Cecilia's Day^ and other things in which Pope tried the serious or natural vein, are only fit to be remembered with Macpherson's Ossian and the classical enormities of the French painter David.
On the whole, it is as a satirist we must think of him, and the second greatest in the language. The gods are in pairs, male and female; and if Dryden was the Mars of English satire. Pope was the Venus — a very eighteenth century Venus, quite as conspicuous for malice as for elegance. If a woman's satire were informed with genius, and cultivated to the utmost perfeftion of form by lifelong and exclusive literary pra6fice, one imagines it would be much like Pope's. His style seems to me feminine in what it lacks; the absence of any geniality, any softening humour to abate its mortal thrust. It is feminine in what it has, the malice, the cruel dexterity, the delicate needle point which hardly betrays its hght and swift entry, yet stings like a bee. Even in his coarseness — as in the Dunciad — Pope appears to me female. It is the coarseness of the fine ladies of that material time, the Lady Maries and the rest of them. Dryden is a rough and thick-natured man, cudgelling his adversaries with coarse speech in the heat and brawl and the bluntness of his sensibihties; a country squire, who is apt at times to use the heavy end of his cutting whip; but when Pope is coarse he is coarse with effort, he goes out of his way to be nasty, in the evident endeavour to imitate a man. It is a girl airing the slang of her schoolboy brother.
The one thing, perhaps, which differentiates him from a woman, and makes it possible to read his verse with a certain pleasure, without that sense of unrelieved cruelty which repels one in much female satire, is his artist's delight in the exercise of his power. You feel that, if there be malice, intent to wound, even spite, yet none of these count for so much with him as the exercise of his superb dexterity in fence. He is like Ortheris fondly patting his rifle after that long shot which knocked over the deserter, in Mr Kipling's story. After all, you refleft, it is fair fight; if his hand was against many men, many men's hands were against him. So you give yourself up to admire the shell-like epigram, the rocketing and dazzling antithesis, the exquisitely deft play of point, by which the little invalid kept in terror his encompassing cloud of enemies — many of them adroit and formidable wits themselves. And you think, also, that the man who was loved by Swift, the professional hater, was not a man without a heart; though he wrote the most finished and brilliant satire in the language.
JAMES THOMSON
WHAT arc the chances of the poet as.i<:ainst the praftical man — the poHtician, for instance — in the game of Fame? The pohtician sees his name daily in the papers, until even he is a little weary of seeing it there. The poet's name appears so rarely that the sight of it has a certain thrill for its owner. But time is all on the side of the poet. The politician's name is barely given a decent burial; it makes haste to its oblivion. Where be the Chancellors of the Exchequer of yester year? The poet, on the contrary, about whom in his life people speak shyly, has his name shouted from the housetop as soon as he is out of earshot. So great, indeed, is the gratitude of reading beings, that a very little poet, such as the author of The Seasons^ is familiarly known by name to the English-speaking race nearly two centuries after his birth; and now (1897) a new edition of his works has been issued with a memoir that docs not spare a detail, and with notes — * critical appendices ' they are called — that indicate a laboured study of Thomson's text, on the part of so learned an editor as Mr D. C. Tovcy.
Yet Thomson, all the time, is a poet only by courtesy — you could not find in all his formal numbers one spark of the divine fire. Pope may have helped Thomson with The Seasons, as Mr Tovcy thinks Warton right in saying; but between Pope and Thomson there is a vast dividing space of technical accomph'shment. Between Thomson and Wordsworth or any other of the poetical poets, there is more than space, there is an impassable gulf. Yet Mr. Tovey says ' we can trace his influence, we think, in Keats; wc can trace it also in Coleridge. Again, between Wordsworth and Thomson we naturally seek affinities.' Coleridge no doubt, wrote many unreal and pretentious things about Nature — The Hymn before Sunrise we are bold to class among them — and these we can concede — a concession it is — to anybody to bracket with The Seasons. The essential Coleridge is the only Coleridge that the world of letters cares to keep; and there we must say to Thomson's editor, ' Hands off.' Mr. Tovey thinks it worth while to suggest also a resemblance of * essential thought ' between Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn and Thomson's
On the marble tomb The well-dissembled mourner stooping stands, For ever silent and for ever sad.
The ' essence ' of the thing does not lie in the thought at all — the old and obvious thought of the permanent expression of emotion in sculpture. It is a matter of treatment; and Mr Tovey himself does not fail to distinguish the essential difference there. As for Wordsworth (who, by the way, preferred The Castle of Indolence to T^h( Seasons, a preference we share), the association of Thomson's name with his has become a commonplace, and, Hkc most commonplaces, it stands to be revised. Thomson is the link, we are constantly assured, between Milton and Wordsworth, as an observer and an interpreter of Nature. A Httle feeling of heartfreshness in the Spring we may, by searching, find in him — not so much in The Seasons as in A Hymn, where the phrase, ' wide flush the fields,' and the Hne:
And every sense and every heart is joy,
just seem to be a degree less distant and conventional than was usual with the eighteenth century Muse. But here, again, the thought is of ancient days; it is the presentment that is the essence; and three of the Spring lines in the Intimations of Immortality are worth many times more than all the six thousand or so lines of The Seasons, however indefinitely multiplied. The difference is, in truth, of kind and not of degree; and these comparisons between things which have no relativity make us feel like ' young Celadon and his Amelia,' when they ' looked unutterable things ' — the only phrase by which Thomson is likely to be spontaneously remembered.
We do not forget that the Thomson- Wordsworth superstition had an illustrious origin — it began in Wordsworth's own saying that ' from Milton to Thomson no poet had added to Enghsh literature a new image drawn from Nature.' That is one of the generous ohiter dicta great poets have made from time to time for the bewilderment of the unwary. Dr Johnson, it is true, took Thomson seriously, or wrote as though he did; but we remember that when he read The Seasons aloud to his friend Shiels, and extorted the listener's praise, he added, ' Well, sir, I have omitted every other line.' He was angry, for all that, when Lyttelton, after the poet's death, abbreviated his poem on Liberty before pubhshing it — such mutilations, Dr Johnson said, tended ' to destroy the confidence of society and to confound the charafters of authors! ' Horace Walpole uttered his contempt for Thomson straight out; but Boswell ivas poHtic, as became him; and his own personal judgement is, no doubt, shrewdly pitted against Johnson's more favourable opinion in the phrase: * His Seasons are indeed full of elegant and pious sentiments; but a rank soil, nay, a dunghill, will produce beautiful flowers.'
For and against Thomson, in seasons and out, the vain tale of opinions would take too long in the telling. But Cowper it was who said that Thomson's ' lasting fame ' proved him a ' true poet.' He would be a yet truer poet to-day, on that reasoning, for his ' fame ' is still lasting. His Ride, Britannia has a place in anthologies even now; he is the bard in popular possession of the name he bears (a name that Praed hated), althouirh stories are told of confusion in circulating Hbraries and book shops between the poet of Tht: Seasons and the poet of The City) of Dreadful Night — that later James Thomson who, conscious of the identity of his name with his predecessor's, added stanzas to the Castle of Indolc7ice. The secret of this sustained name — we distinguish name from fame — is easily guessed. The common mention of Milton and Wordsworth in Thomson's company supports his superfluous immortality. Poet or no poet, he is mixed up with poets, and is a part of poetical history.
And the added irony of this careful preservation of a name that stands for little or nothing is this — that whereas Thomson's naturahsm was, in his own time, sufficiently marked to set his reputation going, we, with all the great poets of Nature between him and us, read him now, if we read him at all, for the very opposite quality — for artificiality. We tolerate him for his last-centuryness. We have a certain curiosity in observing an observation of Nature which was rewarded no more intimately than by a knowledge of the time-sequence of snowdrop, crocus, primrose, and ' violet darkly blue.' We like to hear him speak of young birds as * the feathered youth '; of his women readers as ' the British fair '; of Sir Thomas More as having withstood ' the brutal tyrant's useful rage.' Such phrases speak to us from another world than ours, from a world which had taste that was not touched with emotion; from a world, in short, which lacked the one thing needful for poetical life — inspiration.