ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744) BY THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY LEXANDER POPE, the foremost English poet of the eighteenth century, was born in Lombard Street, London, on May 21st, 1688, and died at Twickenham, May 30th, 1744. In our literature he is the earliest man of letters pure and simple. With that pursuit previous writers had mingled other avocations, if indeed literature itself had not been with them an avocation amid the distraction of other pursuits. Chaucer was a soldier and a diplomatist. Spenser was a government official. Shakespeare was an actor, besides being connected with the management of the company of which he was a member. Milton was an eager and earnest participant in the fierce religious and political strife of his time. Even Dryden held a position in the civil service. But Pope was never anything else than a man of letters. That career he had chosen from the first; and to it he remained faithful to the last. It was mainly due to choice; partly it was a result of necessity. He was the son of a linen-draper who was a Roman Catholic; and Pope, though almost a latitudinarian in matters of religion, stood stanchly to the end by the faith of his parents. His creed accordingly shut him out of all the posts of profit and sinecures with which it was then not uncommon to reward literary merit. Even had it been otherwise, it is not likely that he would have been turned aside from his choice by the attraction of any other pursuit. In his case the Muse cannot be said to have been ungrateful. To him in a most unusual sense poetry was its own exceeding great reward. It lifted him to a station such as no man of letters before his time had ever attained, and few have attained since,- and this too in spite of obstacles that it might seem would have put an effectual bar in the way of success. A member of a proscribed religious body, with no advantages of birth and fortune, with every disadvantage of personal appearance, he raised himself by the sheer force of genius to a position of equality with the highest of the land. Unplaced, untitled, he became the companion and friend of nobles and ministers of State, without in a single instance sacrificing his personal selfrespect, or appearing even to his bitterest foes in the light of a dependent upon the favor of the great. In one way this extraordinary success was due to good fortune. Pope saw the beginning of the end of the system of patronage, and was to profit more than any one else by the method of publication by subscription which to some extent took its place in the transition that was going on to the system of publication now in force. Before his time authors generally relied for their support, not on the sale of their works, but upon the gifts received from the wealthy and powerful. To them they dedicated their productions, usually in terms of fulsome eulogy; from them they received a reward varying with the feelings and character of the bestower. The extravagant praise given to ordinary men in these dedications by Pope's great predecessor has cast something of a stain upon the reputation of Dryden; though all that can be justly said against him was that in the general daubing which every patron at that time received, his was the hand that laid on the plaster with most skill and most effectiveness. But Pope was reduced to no such sad necessity. The publication by subscription of his translation of the Iliad, completed when he was but little over thirty years old, with the subsequent translation of the Odyssey, brought out in a similar way, made him pecuniarily independent. He was never forced in consequence to resort for his subsistence to any of those shifts and mean devices. as they appear at least from the modern point of view-to which many of his most eminent contemporaries betook themselves either from choice or from necessity. Not merely his example, but also his precepts, tended to bring the whole system of patronage into disrepute. All these feelings about the early adverse conditions which had surrounded him, and the success with which he had triumphed over them, came to his mind when late in life-it was in the year 1737-he brought out his imitation of the second epistle of the second book of Horace. In these following lines, possessed of special biographic interest, he recalled the disabilities under which he and his parents had suffered, and expressed his joy in the right he had earned to boast that Homer had made him independent of the favor of the powerful: - "Bred up at home, full early I begun To read in Greek the wrath of Peleus's son. To hunt for truth in Maudlin's learned grove): Deprived us soon of our paternal cell; And certain laws, by sufferers thought unjust, Denied all posts of profit or of trust: Hopes after hopes of pious Papists failed, While mighty William's thundering arm prevailed. For right hereditary taxed and fined, And me the Muses helped to undergo it: But (thanks to Homer) since I live and thrive, Sure I should want the care of ten Monroes, If I would scribble rather than repose. Years following years steal something every day, At last they steal us from ourselves away; In one our frolics, one amusements end, In one a mistress drops, in one a friend: If every wheel of that unwearied mill, That turned ten thousand verses, now stands still ?» In many respects Pope's life was peculiarly uneventful in the usually uneventful life of an author. His father quitted his business while the son was still a child, and took up his residence at Binfield in Berkshire, on the northern border of Windsor Forest. From that place he went in 1716 to Chiswick. In October of the following year he died. Early in 1718 Pope left Chiswick, and removed with his mother to Twickenham, about twelve miles from the centre of the city of London proper. There he leased a house surrounded with five acres on the banks of the Thames. On the adornment and improvement of these grounds he spent henceforth time, thought, and money. Through them ran the highway from Hampton Court to London, and the two portions of his property were connected by a tunnel under the road. This underground passage, styled a grotto, possessed a spring; and was adorned with shells, corals, crystals, and in general with an assortment of natural curiosities, to which Dr. Johnson in his life of the poet applies the name of "fossil bodies." This grotto became noted; and references to it are by no means unfrequent in the literature of the day. Twickenham remained henceforth Pope's home, and his residence in it made it even during his lifetime classic ground. From that place he ruled with almost undisputed sway over English letters, making and unmaking reputations by the praise or blame he bestowed in a single line. Pope had almost from his infancy been devoted to literature. He never really knew what it was to be a boy. His health, always delicate, would not have endured the close confinement and hard application of any rigid system of training. As he was a Catholic, he could not have attended a public school had he so wished. That deprivation was to him however no misfortune. Sickly and deformed, precocious and sensitive, he would have been little at home in that brutal boy-world, which spares the feelings of no comrade on the ground of personal or mental defects. Accordingly he was thrown from his earliest years upon the society of books and of his elders. Taught mainly by private tutors and schoolmasters more or less incapable, his education was mainly of a desultory character; and for the best part of it he was indebted to himself. For his purposes it was probably none the worse on that account. Living a secluded life in the country, he early manifested all the tastes and aspirations of the born man of letters. While yet a mere boy he made translations into verse, he wrote an epic, he wrote a tragedy; and long before he reached his majority, he had displayed powers which attracted the attention of men prominent in the social and literary world. His active career as a man of letters began with the publication of his 'Pastorals.' These appeared in 1709 in the sixth volume of Tonson's Miscellany. Never was there a kind of literature more unreal and conventional than that to which they belonged, though our ancestors persuaded themselves, or affected to believe, that it was a return to the simplicity of nature. The poetical pieces of the character then written are the most artificial products of an artificial age. At their best no inhabitant of either city or country ever talked or felt in real life as did those who are represented as bearing a part in their dialogue; at their worst they were so expressionless as to resemble much more the bleating of sheep than the song of shepherds. Yet they had been made a fashion. Those of Pope were received with great contemporary applause, which, so far as the melody of the numbers was concerned, was fully deserved. Following these on not altogether dissimilar lines was the descriptive poem Windsor Forest,' which came out in 1712. At a later period Pope apparently learned to despise the taste which had inspired these productions. "Who could take offense," he said, referring to them, ( "While pure description took the place of sense?» A far more worthy and substantial success was achieved by the 'Essay on Criticism,' which appeared in 1711. Pope was but twentythree years old at the time of its publication. The production, however, is a remarkable one in many ways. The rules and maxims are indeed little more than commonplaces; but the skill with which they are expressed makes this poem, considering its character and the youth of its writer, one of the most signal illustrations of precocity which our literature furnishes. In it in particular occur a number of those pointed lines which have contributed to render Pope, with the single exception of Shakespeare, the most frequently quoted author in our speech. To "snatch a grace beyond the reach of art,” and "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread," are perhaps the most familiar of the numerous sayings, which, occurring originally in this poem, are now heard from the lips of everybody. But these, as has been indicated, are far from being the only ones; while the following comparison of the increasing difficulties that invariably wait upon effort to reach the highest place has always been justly admired: "So pleased at first, the towering Alps we try, Mount o'er the vales and seem to tread the sky; And the first clouds and mountains seem the last: The growing labors of the lengthened way; The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes; The greatest success, however, of Pope's early career was his mockheroic poem of the Rape of the Lock.' This appeared in its original form in 1712, but its present much enlarged form belongs to 1714. The poem stands by itself in our literature. There is none like it; and it may not be too much to say that in no literature is there anything of the kind equaling it. The productions already mentioned, with the 'Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady' and the epistle of 'Eloïsa to Abélard,' constitute the most important contributions that Pope made to English literature before he had completed his version of the Iliad. They stand largely distinct in spirit and in matter from the work of his later years. Some of them address the emotional side of our nature, as contrasted with the appeal to the purely intellectual side which is the distinguishing note of everything written after the publication of the translation of the Odyssey. To use his own words, he thenceforward "Stooped to truth, and moralized his song»; though this is a line which expresses his own belief rather than his actual performance. These early productions brought him general reputation, and the personal friendship of men eminent in the world. of society and of letters. The good opinion of all was confirmed by the publication of his translation of the Iliad, the first installment of which was published in 1715, and the last as late as 1720. It was this work which at that time established Pope's reputation and fortune on a secure basis. To some extent it was necessity that led him to undertake it, rather than strong desire or special qualification. His father's fortune, whatever it was, had been reduced by investments that turned out unfortunately. His own original work had been paid for on a scale which the pettiest author of the present |