Halleck's New English Literature · Chapter 59Alexander Pope, 1688-1744
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[Illustration: ALEXANDER POPE. From the portrait by William Hoare.]
Life.—Alexander Pope was born in London in 1688. His father, a devout Catholic, was a linen merchant, who gave his son little formal schooling, but allowed him to pick up his education by reading such authors as pleased his fancy.
He was a very precocious child. At the age of twelve he was writing an Ode on Solitude. He chose his vocation early, for writing poetry was the business of his life.
In his childhood, his parents removed from London to Binfield, a village in Berkshire, nine miles from Windsor. When he was nearly thirty years old, his translation of the Iliad enabled him to buy a house and grounds at Twickenham on the Thames, about twelve miles above London. He lived here for the rest of his life, indulging his taste for landscape gardening and entertaining the greatest men of the age.
After early middle life, his writings made him pecuniarily independent, but he suffered much from ill health. In his Lives of the English Poets, Dr. Samuel Johnson says of Pope:—
"By natural deformity, or accidental distortion, his vital functions were so much disordered that his life was a long disease… When he rose, he was invested in a bodice made of stiff canvas, being scarce able to hold himself erect till they were laced, and he then put on a flannel waistcoat. One side was contracted. His legs were so slender that he enlarged their bulk with three pair of stockings…
"In all his intercourse with mankind, he had great delight in artifice, and endeavored to attain all his purposes by indirect and unsuspected methods. He hardly drank tea without a stratagem."
The publication of his correspondence tangled him in a mesh of deceptions, because his desire to appear in a favorable light led him to change letters that he had sent to friends. His double-dealing, intense jealousy, and irritability, due to his physical condition, caused him to become involved in many quarrels, which gave him the opportunity to indulge to the utmost his own satiric tendency. In one of his late satires, The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, he charged Addison with the inclination to—
"Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer."
On the basis of what he wrote, we may divide his life into three periods. During his first thirty years, he produced various kinds of verse, like the Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock. The middle period of his life was marked by his translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. In his third period, he wrote moral and didactic poems, like the Essay on Man, and satires, like the Dunciad.
[Illustration: POPE'S VILLA AT TWICKENHAM. From an old print.]
Some Poems of the First Period: Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock.—Pope's first published poem, The Pastorals, which appeared in 1709, was followed in 1711 by An Essay on Criticism,—an exquisite setting of a number of gems of criticism which had for a long time been current. Pope's intention in writing this poem may be seen from what he himself says: "It seems not so much the perfection of sense to say things that have never been said before, as to express those best that have been said oftenest."
From this point of view, the poem is remarkable. No other writer, except Shakespeare, has in an equal number of lines said so many things which have passed into current quotation. Rare perfection in the form of statement accounts for this. The poem abounds in such lines as these:—
"For fools rush in where angels fear to tread."
"To err is human, to forgive divine."
"All seems infected that th' infected spy, As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye."
"In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold, Alike fantastic if too new or old: Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."
The Rape of the Lock, which is Pope's masterpiece, is almost a romantic poem, even though it is written in classical couplets. It was a favorite with Oliver Goldsmith, and James Russell Lowell rightly say says: "The whole poem more truly deserves the name of a creation than anything Pope ever wrote." The poem is a mock epic, and it has the supernatural machinery which was supposed to be absolutely necessary for an epic. In place of the gods and goddesses of the great epics, however, the fairy-like sylphs help to guide the action of this poem.
The poem, which is founded on an actual incident, describes a young lord's theft of a lock of hair from the head of a court beauty. Pope composed The Rape of the Lock to soothe her indignation and to effect a reconciliation. The whole of this poem should be read by the student, as it is a vivid satiric picture of fashionable life in Queen Anne's reign.
[Illustration: RAPE OF THE LOCK. From a drawing by B. Westmacott.]
Translation of Homer.—Pope's chief work during the middle period of his life was his translation of the Iliad and of the Odyssey of Homer. From a financial point of view, these translations were the most successful of his labors. They brought him in nearly £9000, and made him independent of bookseller or of nobleman.
The remarkable success of these works is strange when we remember that Pope's knowledge of Greek was very imperfect, and that he was obliged to consult translations before attempting any passage. The Greek scholar Bentley, a contemporary of Pope, delivered a just verdict on the translation: "A pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer." The historian Gibbon said that the poem had every merit except faithfulness to the original.
Homer is simple and direct. He abounds in concrete terms. Pope dislikes a simple term and loves a circumlocution and an abstraction. We have the concrete "herd of swine" translated into "a bristly care," "skins," into "furry spoils." The concrete was considered common and undignified. Homer says in simple language: "His father wept with him," but Pope translates this: "The father poured a social flood."
Pope used to translate thirty or forty verses of the Iliad before rising, and then to spend a considerable time in polishing them. But half of the translation of the Odyssey is his own work. He employed assistants to finish the other half; but it is by no means easy to distinguish his work from theirs.
[Illustration: ALEXANDER POPE. From contemporary portrait.]
Some Poems of his Third Period: "Essay on Man," and "Satires."—The Essay on Man is a philosophical poem with the avowed object of vindicating the ways of God to man. The entire poem is an amplification of the idea contained in these lines:—
"All nature is but art unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good. And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right."
The chief merit of the poem consists in throwing into polished form many of the views current at the time, so that they may be easily understood. Before we read very far we come across such old acquaintances as—
"The proper study of mankind is man."
"An honest man's the noblest work of God."
"Vice is a monster of so frightful mien As, to be hated, needs but to be seen; Yet, seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace."
The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot and The Dunciad are Pope's greatest satires. In The Dunciad, an epic of the dunces, he holds up to ridicule every person and writer who had offended him. These were in many cases scribblers who had no business with a pen; but in a few instances they were the best scholars of that day. A great deal of the poem is now very tiresome reading. Much of it is brutal. Pope was a powerful agent, as Thackeray says, in rousing that obloquy which has ever since pursued a struggling author. The Dunciad could be more confidently consulted about contemporary literary history, if Pope had avoided such unnecessary misstatements as:—
"Earless on high, stood unabash'd De Foe."
This line is responsible for the current unwarranted belief that the author of Robinson Crusoe lost his ears in the pillory.
General Characteristics.—-Pope has not strong imagination, a keen feeling for nature, or wide sympathy with man. Leslie Stephen says: "Pope never crosses the undefinable, but yet ineffaceable line, which separates true poetry from rhetoric." The debate in regard to whether Pope's verse is ever genuine poetry may not yet be settled to the satisfaction of all; but it is well to recognize the undoubted fact that his couplets still appeal to many readers who love clearness and precision and who are not inclined to wrestle with the hidden meaning of greater poetry. One of his poems, The Rape of the Lock, has become almost a universal favorite because of its humor, good-natured satire, and entertaining pictures of society in Queen Anne's time.
He is the poet who best expresses the classical spirit of the eighteenth century. He excels in satiric and didactic verse. He expresses his ideas in perfect form, and embodies them in classical couplets, sometimes styled "rocking-horse meter"; but he shows no power of fathoming the emotional depths of the soul.
In the history of literature, he holds an important place, because, more than any other writer, he calls attention to the importance of correctness of form and of careful expression. He is the prince of artificial poets. Though he erred in exalting form above matter, he taught his age the needed lesson of careful workmanship.