plea for these people than any they have made use of. If Obscurity or Poverty were to exempt a man from Satire, much more should Folly or Dulness, which are still more involuntary; nay, as much so as personal Deformity. But even this will not help them: Deformity becomes an object of Ridicule when a man sets up for being handsome; and so must Dulness when he sets up for being a Wit. They are not ridiculed. because Ridicule in itself is, or ought to be, a pleasure; but because it is just to undeceive and vindicate the honest and unpretending part of mankind from imposition, because particular interest ought to yield to general, and a great number who are not naturally Fools, ought never to be made so, in complaisance to those who are. Accordingly we find that in all ages, all vain pretenders, were they ever so poor or ever so dull, have been constantly the topics of the most candid satirists, from the Codrus of Juvenal to the Damon of Boileau." Having mentioned Boileau, the writer then proceeds to institute a comparison between that poet and Pope, with a view of sheltering the latter behind a great authority. Now Boileau is above all things a 'candid satirist,' and his satire, as Pope says, was directed against pretenders. Take, for instance, his account of his motives in his Address A son Esprit.' He supposes an objector to. protest that it was wrong in him to attack the writings of Chapelain, because the latter was so good a man: the fact of his victim's goodness he fully recognizes : Mais que pour un modèle on montre ses écrits ; Here it is evident that Boileau's plea is quite different from any that Pope could justly advance. In the first place he does not satirise the man, but his writings; in the second place he satirises a pretender who had actually succeeded in imposing upon the public. Chapelain, who is said to have received a pension of 8000 livres, had been the instrument of Cardinal Richelieu, who wished to be as absolute in art as he was in politics; and Cotin, another of Boileau's victims, exercised through the fashionable Hôtel Rambouillet, of which he was a client, a powerful influence on the opinions of the time. It was, of course, open to Boileau's adversaries to argue that his attacks were merely prompted by envy; but on the other hand, if his own premisses were allowed, it was certain that Chapelain, Cotin and the rest, might go great lengths in corrupting the public taste. But could this be said of Dennis, Ralph, Oldmixon, and the other scribblers whose 'poverty and obscurity' were ridiculed in the 'Dunciad'? No doubt they 'set up for being wits,' but was it the case that a great number who were not naturally fools,' were made so by believing in their pretensions? Of the whole crew, James Moore Smyth was the only one who had an entrance into fashionable society, and he was of little consideration there; while the recognized supremacy in literature of writers like Pope, Swift, and Arbuthnot, ought to have proved that there was no pressing necessity for a satirist to protect the honest and unpretending part of mankind from imposition.' : It is evident from these considerations that we cannot accept literally Pope's estimate of his satire as the 'honest zeal' of a moral reformer. Must we then adopt as the only alternative his enemies' view of his character? According to these he was the Joseph Surface of poetry, of whom it may he said ironically There is nothing in the world so noble as a man of sentiment.' And no doubt a very large number of Pope's actions must be ascribed to deliberate hypocrisy. It was hypocrisy which made him complain in a letter to Caryll (May 12, 1735) of Curll's 'shameless industry' in publishing the surreptitious edition of the Letters in 1735, when he himself had furnished Curl with his materials; hypocrisy which made him disavow to the same correspondent (31st Dec., 1734) the authorship of the 'Sober Advice,' almost at the very moment that he was sending the MS. of that poem to Bolingbroke; hypocrisy which prompted him to report further to Caryll (18th Feb., 1734-5) how he had disavowed the poem to young Bentley, who complained of the addition of his father's name to the notes on the Satire, but apologised on being told that Pope was not the writer; hypocrisy which caused him to publish as 'just warm from the brain,' the verses on 'The Dying Christian to his Soul,' an inferior copy of which had been sent to Caryll more than twenty years before the publication of the fictitious letter to Steele in which it was pretended that the finished verses had been enclosed.' All these frauds, and many more of the same kind, tell their own tale, and those who like to conceive of an entire character by seizing on some of its most prominent features, may be content to dash off the portrait of Pope by saying that lying and equivocation was the habit of his life.'" But this hypothesis will not cover all the facts of the case. However deeply intrigue and falsehood may have corrupted his whole code of literary morals, there was a large portion of his character which cannot be explained in this way. There was no unreality in his indignant zeal on behalf of the injured Mrs. Weston; in the relief which he afforded to the sufferings of Mrs. Cope; in his generous and patient bounty to Savage; in the liberal interest he showed in the rising merits of Johnson; above all in his life-long devotion to his parents. Lord Chesterfield testifies strongly to this effect. Pope,' says he, 'was as great an instance as any he quotes of the contrarieties and inconsistencies of human nature; for notwithstanding the. malignancy of his satires, and some blamable passages of his life, he was charitable to his power, active in doing good offices, and piously attentive to an old bed-ridden mother, who died but a little time before him.' Add to this that in the See Vol. VII. of this Edition, p. 397 and p. 187. 2 Macaulay Essays, one-vol. edit., p. 718. professions of virtuous motive, which abound in his satires, there is a ring of sincerity which sounds different from the hollow generalities of the practised hypocrite. His popularity, too, is evidence in his favour; the world finds out the real quality of men in the long run; but the changes of time and taste have not affected Pope's position as one of the great English classics. In Pope, then, we have to do with a remarkably complex character. It will not do simply to brand him as a hypocrite, for the essence of hypocrisy consists in unreality; but behind the falsities of Pope there is an eagerness and intensity which gives them a human interest, and makes us feel that, in his poetry, we are in contact with the nature of the man himself. To separate that moral nature into its various elements, so as to decide how much is deliberately false, how much may be accepted as true, and how much is self-deception, we ought, following his own rule, to examine his Proper character, His fable, subject, scope in every page, On this principle much of the inconsistency in his conduct will be found to correspond with the union of opposite conditions in his nature: the piercing intelligence and artistic power, lodged in the sickly and deformed frame; the vivid perception of the ridiculous in others, joined to the most sensitive consciousness of his own defects; the passionate desire for fame, aggravated by a fear of being suspected by his countrymen on account of his religion; the conflicting qualities of benevolence and self-love; the predominance of intellectual instinct; the deficiency of moral principle. It might be predicted of a character so highly strung, so variously endowed, so 'tremblingly alive' to opinion, and so capable of transformation, that it would exhibit itself in the most diverse aspects, according to the circumstances by which it was tested. And this is just what we find. Perhaps no man of genius was ever more largely influenced by his companions and his surroundings than Pope. The history of his literary life falls naturally into three periods: i., the period of retired study and imaginative composition at Binfield; ii., the period of the Translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, during which most of his personal and literary feuds occurred, and which closes with the publication of the 'Dunciad; ' iii., the period when, falling under the influence of Bolingbroke, after the return of the latter from exile, he wrote the Essay on Man,' and his moral and political satires. i. His instincts were domestic. Mr. Pope,' writes Swift to Gay (May 4, 1832), 'has always loved a domestic life from his youth.' The larger part of his life was spent at Binfield, in the retirement of Windsor Forest. There the weakliness of his frame, and the limitation of his acquaintance, as well as the bent of his genius, encouraged him in habits of incessant study, and there he furnished himself with those stores of reading, out of which he constructed his ideas of men and society. The impressions of things, which he thus formed, were lasting; his most familiar correspondence and his most bitter satire continued till his death to bear marks of his early intercourse with Cicero, Seneca, and Montaigne; and he invariably viewed his own character through the medium of the moral sentiments which he derived from those writers. His existence in the Forest was undisturbed by the quarrels and vexations of his later years, and the character of all his early poetry is pastoral, pathetic, ardent, and fanciful. Here he wrote the delicate and beautiful 'Rape of the Lock,' and conceived the idea of the passionate Elegy on the Unfortunate Lady,' and formed the abstract system of taste expounded in the Essay on Criticism.' At the same time, in the last-named poem, the germs of his native satiric faculty showed themselves in those 'strokes of ill-nature,' to which Addison objected in the 'Spectator;' while the curious precocity of his intellect enabled him to correspond on an equal footing with men of the world like Cromwell and Wycherley. Altogether this was probably the period of his life when his happiness was most complete; it was certainly then that his creative genius was most active. |