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order in 1743. It is significant that in an age by no means distinguished by morality it was deemed necessary that every poem should point a moral. The noblest wisdom is seen by the light of the imagination, and a great poet is no doubt also a great teacher; but the chief end of poetry is to yield delight, and the power of the poet rests upon the faculty of song, and not upon his didactic precepts. If the versemen of the eighteenth century had understood this truth, our literature might have been spared many a treatise in rhyme written by sound moralists and bad poets. Pope did not understand it, and in spite of an occasional grossness that sometimes borders on obscenity, he invariably poses as a moralist. His moral sayings and his reasoning may be false or feeble, often they are both, but the reader does not open Pope to weigh his opinions, but to enjoy his wit and fancy and his consummate art of expression, and with these delightful gifts the "Moral Essays" abound.

None of Pope's poems are more worthy of his fame than the "Imitations of Horace," written in the form of Epistles (1733-38). For happy ease of versification, for keenness of satire, and for variety of illustration, these pieces are unrivalled, and were it not for many grossly abusive passages in which satire degenerates into lampoon, they might be praised without reserve as the finest expression of his satirical genius. The Prologue to the Satires addressed to his friend Dr. Arbuthnot, although often indecently unjust, abounds with familiar lines and passages. that poem Pope's friends Granville and Garth, Congreve and Swift, Atterbury and Bolingbroke, Gay and Arbuthnot himself are all felicitously mentioned; and there, too, we have the wonder. d

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ful portrait of Addison and many cruel lines on Lord Hervey, Burnet, Bentley, Dennis, Theobald and Cibber, and on Ambrose Philips, who

"Just writes to make his barrenness appear,

And strains from hard-bound brains eight lines a year.'

Occasionally in the " Imitations," as in the "Essay on Man," Pope rises into a strain that is at once beautiful and pathetic. Lines like the following show the poet in his happiest mood ;

"Long as to him who works for debt, the day,
Long as the night to her whose love's away,
Long as the year's dull circle seems to run
When the brisk minor pants for twenty-one ;
So slow the unprofitable moments roll
That lock up all the functions of my soul;
That keep me from myself; and still delay
Life's instant business to a future day:
That task, which as we follow or despise,
The eldest is a fool, the youngest wise :
Which done, the poorest can no wants endure;
And which not done, the richest must be poor."

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At an age when most men are in their prime, Pope discovered that life after the first warm heats are over is all down hill." His bodily condition may account very much for his irritability of temper, and for the trickeries and intrigues that were his meat and drink. He could look at nothing in a clear straightforward way, and could not, it is said, make tea without a stratagem. His miserable body was a constant torment to him, and he was never able to accept his infirmities in a patient manly spirit. In later life he was too feeble to dress or undress without help, and required the support of stays. By night as well as by day he claimed attention, and could not, as Swift said, ride a mile or walk two. Such was the brutality of the age, that the poet's deformity supplied "the dunces with miserable jests," and to Pope every such jest was torture. Truly but

cruelly did his friend Lord Orrery say-friends who know us best often inflict the sharpest stings -that he had mens curva in corpore curvo. To a man so unfortunate much may be forgiven, and, without condoning his offences, it will not be amiss perhaps if the feeling of blame is lost in that of pity. Yet one needs a large share of charity to tolerate the grosser faults of Pope, and especially the elaborate system of deception he pursued with regard to the publication of his letters. This was in some measure suspected by Dr. Johnson, but it was left to the late Mr. Dilke to unravel all the threads of this complicated network of intrigue. By the discovery of the Caryll correspondence, he was able to show that the poet had by the most tortuous art endeavoured to deceive the public and to delude his friends also.

With his friend Caryll, of West Grinstead, a correspondence began in 1710, and lasted until 1735, and on the plea that his letters might be stolen, Pope requested him to return them. He did so reluctantly, having previously taken copies. After the death of Caryll in 1736, Pope used these letters so as to present them to the public in a way most favourable to his own reputation. He changed the addresses and the dates, interpolated passages, and altered their original purport, in order to delude readers with a sense of the writer's exalted virtue. Writing of Pope's correspondence generally, Dr. Johnson, who considered it studied and artificial, observes that it "filled the nation with praises of his candour, tenderness, and benevolence, the purity of his purposes, and the fidelity of his friendship." Unfor. tunately, these indications of the loftiest morality are now known to be entirely misleading, for the

letters, instead of uttering what was in the writer's heart at the time, owe whatever interest they possess to the elaborate manipulation of a literary craftsman. According to Pope's representations, one series of his letters had been surreptitiously printed by the piratical bookseller Curll, another series by Lord Oxford, in spite of his disapproval, while some unknown persoL. obtained by unknown means a large collection, which he printed secretly at his own expense and sold for a trifle. The truth is, however, that every plot in relation to the publication of the letters was concocted by Pope himself, and that the unscrupulous bookseller whom he accused and professed to fear, was but a tool in his hands. "The facts," Mr. Courthope writes, " speak for themselves. They show that to exalt his own reputation Pope on three several occasions deliberately deceived the public by conniving at the publication of his correspondence, while at the same time protesting that this had been effected without his knowledge and against his wish. They show that he had no scruple whatever in altering and transposing his original letters, and in readdressing them to persons to whom they had never been sent. Lastly, they show that in the execution of his schemes there was no form of deceit from equivocation to direct falsehood, which he hesitated to employ, and that not even the obligations of friendship were sacred from the exactions of his vanity and self-love."1

Probably Pope's worst stratagem was directed against his warmest and most distinguished friend. Swift knew that Pope cherished schemes of epistolary fame, and remarked, with his accustomed good sense, that if letters are written

1 "The Life of Alexander Pope," p. 294.

cease to be

with a view to publication they letters, and become a jeu d'esprit. The Dean's splendid intellect was approaching its decay when Pope urged him to return his letters on the plea that they might be misused after Swift's death. He replied : "You need not fear any consequence in the commerce that has so long passed between us, although I never destroyed one of your letters. But my executors are men of honour and virtue, who have strict orders in my will to burn every letter left behind me."

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Such instructions would of course have proved fatal to Pope's purpose, nor was he better pleased when Swift promised that all the letters, "well sealed and pacquetted," should be sent to Twickenham on his death. The poet therefore became more eager in the matter, and applied to Lord Orrery to urge his wishes with the Dean. Orrery obtained the letters, and brought them to Pope, who printed the correspondence clandestinely, and sent the volume to Swift with an anonymous letter urging him to publish it. Swift was willing to do so. The publisher, however, waited for Pope's permission, and his cue was hesitate and to object. He asked Lord Orrery to read the book, who did so, with the unpleasant criticism that it was unworthy to be published." He, however, adopted Pope's suggestion that it was now too late to withdraw the letters. An attempt was then made by Pope to induce the publisher to throw upon Swift the whole responsibility of the affair, but this he declined to do, and the book appeared without it. How was Pope to account for the publication of the letters brought to him in a sealed packet by Lord Orrery? how also was he to account for the appearance of Swift's letters which were in

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