Books: Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope
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Samuel Johnson >> Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope
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If the Letters of Pope are considered merely as compositions, they
seem to be premeditated and artificial. It is one thing to write
because there is something which the mind wishes to discharge, and
another to solicit the imagination because ceremony or vanity
requires something to be written. Pope confesses his early Letters
to be vitiated with AFFECTATION AND AMBITION: to know whether he
disentangled himself from these perverters of epistolary integrity,
his book and his life must be set in comparison. One of his
favourite topics is contempt of his own poetry. For this, if it had
been real, he would deserve no commendation; and in this he was
certainly not sincere, for his high value of himself was
sufficiently observed; and of what could he be proud but of his
poetry? He writes, he says, when "he has just nothing else to do;"
yet Swift complains that he was never at leisure for conversation,
because he "had always some poetical scheme in his head." It was
punctually required that his writing-box should be set upon his bed
before he rose; and Lord Oxford's domestic related that, in the
dreadful winter of Forty, she was called from her bed by him four
times in one night, to supply him with paper, lest he should lose a
thought. He pretends insensibility to censure and criticism, though
it was observed by all who knew him that every pamphlet disturbed
his quiet, and that his extreme irritability laid him open to
perpetual vexation; but he wished to despise his critics, and
therefore hoped that he did despise them. As he happened to live in
two reigns when the court paid little attention to poetry, he nursed
in his mind a foolish disesteem of kings, and proclaims that "he
never sees courts." Yet a little regard shown him by the Prince of
Wales melted his obduracy; and he had not much to say when he was
asked by his Royal Highness, "How he could love a prince while he
disliked kings?"
He very frequently professes contempt of the world, and represents
himself as looking on mankind, sometimes with gay indifference, as
on emmets of a hillock, below his serious attention; and sometimes
with gloomy indignation, as on monsters more worthy of hatred than
pity. These were dispositions apparently counterfeited. How could
he despise those whom he lived by pleasing, and on whose approbation
his esteem of himself was superstructed? Why should he hate those
to whose favour he owed his honour and his ease? Of things that
terminate in human life, the world is the proper judge: to despise
its sentence, if it were possible, is not just; and if it were just,
is not possible. Pope was far enough from this unreasonable temper;
he was sufficiently A FOOL TO FAME, and his fault was that he
pretended to neglect it. His levity and his sullenness were only in
his letters; he passed through common life, sometimes vexed, and
sometimes pleased, with the natural emotions of common men. His
scorn of the great is repeated too often to be real; no man thinks
much of that which he despises; and as falsehood is always in danger
of inconsistency, he makes it his boast at another time that he
lives among them. It is evident that his own importance swells
often in his mind. He is afraid of writing, lest the clerks of the
post-office should know his secrets; he has many enemies; he
considers himself as surrounded by universal jealousy: "After many
deaths, and many dispersions, two or three of us," says he, "may
still be brought together, not to plot, but to divert ourselves, and
the world too, if it pleases;" and they can live together, and "show
what friends wits may be, in spite of all the fools in the world."
All this while it was likely that the clerks did not know his hand;
he certainly had no more enemies than a public character like his
inevitably excites; and with what degree of friendship the wits
might live, very few were so much fools as ever to inquire. Some
part of this pretended discontent he learned from Swift, and
expresses it, I think, most frequently in his correspondence with
him. Swift's resentment was unreasonable, but it was sincere;
Pope's was the mere mimicry of his friend, a fictitious part which
he began to play before it became him. When he was only twenty-five
years old, he related that "a glut of study and retirement had
thrown him on the world," and that there was danger lest "a glut of
the world should throw him back upon study and retirement." To this
Swift answered with great propriety, that Pope had not yet acted or
suffered enough in the world to have become weary of it. And,
indeed, it must have been some very powerful reason that can drive
back to solitude him who has once enjoyed the pleasures of society.
In the Letters both of Swift and Pope there appears such narrowness
of mind as makes them insensible of any excellence that has not some
affinity with their own, and confines their esteem and approbation
to so small a number, that whoever should form his opinion of their
age from their representation, would suppose them to have lived
amidst ignorance and barbarity, unable to find among their
contemporaries either virtue or intelligence, and persecuted by
those that could not understand them.
When Pope murmurs at the world, when he professes contempt of fame,
when he speaks of riches and poverty, of success and disappointment,
with negligent indifference, he certainly does not express his
habitual and settled resentments, but either wilfully disguises his
own character, or, what is more likely, invests himself with
temporary qualities, and sallies out in the colours of the present
moment. His hopes and fears, his joys and sorrows, acted strongly
upon his mind, and if he differed from others it was not by
carelessness; he was irritable and resentful; his malignity to
Philips, whom he had first made ridiculous and then hated for being
angry continued too long. Of his vain desire to make Bentley
contemptible I never heard any adequate reason. He was sometimes
wanton in his attacks, and before Chandos, Lady Wortley, and Hill,
was mean in his retreat. The virtues which seem to have had most of
his affection were liberality and fidelity of friendship, in which
it does not appear that he was other than he describes himself. His
fortune did not suffer his character to be splendid and conspicuous,
but he assisted Dodsley with a hundred pounds that he might open a
shop, and of the subscription of forty pounds a year that he raised
for Savage twenty were paid by himself. He was accused of loving
money, but his love was eagerness to gain, not solicitude to keep
it. In the duties of friendship he was zealous and constant; his
early maturity of mind commonly united him with men older than
himself, and therefore, without attaining any considerable length of
life, he saw many companions of his youth sink into the grave; but
it does not appear that he lost a single friend by coldness or by
injury; those who loved him once continued their kindness. His
ungrateful mention of Allen in his will was the effect of his
adherence to one whom he had known much longer, and whom he
naturally loved with greater fondness. His violation of the trust
reposed in him by Bolingbroke could have no motive inconsistent with
the warmest affection; he either thought the action so near to
indifferent that he forgot it, or so laudable that he expected his
friend to approve it. It was reported with such confidence as
almost to enforce belief, that in the papers entrusted to his
executors was found a defamatory Life of Swift, which he had
prepared as an instrument of vengeance, to be used if any
provocation should be ever given. About this I inquired of the Earl
of Marchmont, who assured me that no such piece was among his
remains.
The religion in which he lived and died was that of the Church of
Rome, to which, in his correspondence with Racine, he professes
himself a sincere adherent. That he was not scrupulously pious in
some part of his life is known by many idle and indecent
applications of sentences taken from the Scriptures, a mode of
merriment which a good man dreads for its profaneness, and a witty
man disdains for its easiness and vulgarity. But to whatever
levities he has been betrayed, it does not appear that his
principles were ever corrupted, or that he ever lost his belief of
revelation. The positions which he transmitted from Bolingbroke he
seems not to have understood, and was pleased with an interpretation
that made them orthodox.
A man of such exalted superiority and so little moderation would
naturally have all his delinquencies observed and aggravated; those
who could not deny that he was excellent would rejoice to find that
he was not perfect. Perhaps it may be imputed to the unwillingness
with which the same man is allowed to possess many advantages, that
his learning has been depreciated. He certainly was in his early
life a man of great literary curiosity, and when he wrote his "Essay
on Criticism," had, for his age, a very wide acquaintance with
books. When he entered into the living world it seems to have
happened to him, as to many others, that he was less attentive to
dead masters; he studied in the academy of Paracelsus, and made the
universe his favourite volume. He gathered his notions fresh from
reality, not from the copies of authors, but the originals of
Nature. Yet there is no reason to believe that literature ever lost
his esteem; he always professed to love reading, and Dobson, who
spent some time at his house translating his "Essay on Man," when I
asked him what learning he found him to possess, answered, "More
than I expected." His frequent references to history, his allusions
to various kinds of knowledge, and his images selected from art and
nature, with his observations on the operations of the mind and the
modes of life, show an intelligence perpetually on the wing,
excursive, vigorous, and diligent, eager to pursue knowledge, and
attentive to retain it. From this curiosity arose the desire of
travelling, to which he alludes in his verses to Jervas, and which,
though he never found an opportunity to gratify it, did not leave
him till his life declined.
Of his intellectual character, the constituent and fundamental
principle was good sense, a prompt and intuitive perception of
consonance and propriety. He saw immediately of his own conceptions
what was to be chosen and what to be rejected, and, in the works of
others, what was to be shunned and what was to be copied. But good
sense alone is a sedate and quiescent quality, which manages its
possessions well, but does not increase them; it collects few
materials for its own operations, and preserves safety, but never
gains supremacy. Pope had likewise genius; a mind active,
ambitious, and adventurous, always investigating, always aspiring;
in its widest searches still longing to go forward, in its highest
flights still wishing to be higher, always imagining some thing
greater than it knows, always endeavouring more than it can do. To
assist these powers he is said to have had great strength and
exactness of memory. That which he had heard or read was not easily
lost, and he had before him not only what his own meditations
suggested, but what he had found in other writers that might be
accommodated to his present purpose. These benefits of Nature he
improved by incessant and unwearied diligence; he had recourse to
every source of intelligence, and lost no opportunity of
information; he consulted the living as well as the dead; he read
his compositions to his friends, and was never content with
mediocrity when excellence could be attained. He considered poetry
as the business of his life, and however he might seem to lament his
occupation he followed it with constancy; to make verses was his
first labour, and to mend them was his last. From his attention to
poetry he was never diverted. If conversation offered anything that
could be improved, he committed it to paper; if a thought, or
perhaps an expression, more happy than was common, rose to his mind,
he was careful to write it; an independent distich was preserved for
an opportunity of insertion, and some little fragments have been
found containing lines, or parts of lines, to be wrought upon at
some other time. He was one of those few whose labour is their
pleasure; he was never elevated to negligence nor wearied to
impatience; he never passed a fault unamended by indifference, nor
quitted it by despair. He laboured his works first to gain
reputation, and afterwards to keep it.
Of composition there are different methods. Some employ at once
memory and invention, and, with little intermediate use of the pen,
form and polish large masses by continued meditation, and write
their productions only when, in their own opinion, they have
completed them. It is related of Virgil that his custom was to pour
out a great number of verses in the morning, and pass the day in
retrenching exuberances and correcting inaccuracies. The method of
Pope, as may be collected from his translation, was to write his
first thoughts in his first words, and gradually to amplify,
decorate, rectify, and refine them. With such faculties and such
dispositions he excelled every other writer in poetical prudence; he
wrote in such a manner as might expose him to few hazards. He used
almost always the same fabric of verse, and, indeed, by those few
essays which he made of any other, he did not enlarge his
reputation. Of this uniformity the certain consequence was
readiness and dexterity. By perpetual practice language had, in his
mind, a systematical arrangement; having always the same use for
words, he had words so selected and combined as to be ready at his
call. This increase of facility he confessed himself to have
perceived in the progress of his translation. But what was yet of
more importance, his effusions were always voluntary, and his
subjects chosen by himself. His independence secured him from
drudging at a task, and labouring upon a barren topic; he never
exchanged praise for money, nor opened a shop of condolence or
congratulation. His poems, therefore, were scarcely ever temporary.
He suffered coronations and royal marriages to pass without a song,
and derived no opportunities from recent events, nor any popularity
from the accidental disposition of his readers. He was never
reduced to the necessity of soliciting the sun to shine upon a
birthday, of calling the graces and virtues to a wedding, or of
saying what multitudes have said before him. When he could produce
nothing new he was at liberty to be silent.
His publications were for the same reason never hasty. He is said
to have sent nothing to the press till it had lain two years under
his inspection: it is at least certain that he ventured nothing
without nice examination. He suffered the tumult of imagination to
subside, and the novelties of invention to grow familiar. He knew
that the mind is always enamoured of its own productions, and did
not trust his first fondness. He consulted his friends, and
listened with great willingness to criticism; and, what was of more
importance, he consulted himself, and let nothing pass against his
own judgment. He professed to have learned his poetry from Dryden,
whom, whenever an opportunity was presented, he praised through his
whole life with unvaried liberality; and perhaps his character may
receive some illustration if he be compared with his master.
Integrity of understanding and nicety of discernment were not
allotted in a less proportion to Dryden than to Pope. The rectitude
of Dryden's mind was sufficiently shown by the dismission of his
poetical prejudices, and the rejection of unnatural thoughts and
rugged numbers. But Dryden never desired to apply all the judgment
that he had. He wrote, and professed to write, merely for the
people; and when he pleased others, he contented himself. He spent
no time in struggles to rouse latent powers; he never attempted to
make that better which was already good, nor often to mend what he
must have known to be faulty. He wrote, as he tells us, with very
little consideration; when occasion or necessity called upon him, he
poured out what the present moment happened to supply, and, when
once it had passed the press, ejected it from his mind; for, when he
had no pecuniary interest, he had no further solicitude.
Pope was not content to satisfy; he desired to excel, and therefore
always endeavoured to do his best; he did not court the candour, but
dared the judgment of his reader, and, expecting no indulgence from
others, he showed none to himself. He examined lines and words with
minute and punctilious observation, and retouched every part with
indefatigable diligence, till he had left nothing to be forgiven.
For this reason he kept his pieces very long in his hands, while he
considered and reconsidered them. The only poems which can be
supposed to have been written with such regard to the times as might
hasten their publication, were the two satires of "Thirty-eight;" of
which Dodsley told me that they were brought to him by the author,
that they might be fairly copied. "Almost every line," he said,
"was then written twice over; I gave him a clean transcript, which
he sent some time afterwards to me for the press, with almost every
line written twice over a second time." His declaration, that his
care for his works ceased at their publication, was not strictly
true. His parental attention never abandoned them; what he found
amiss in the first edition, he silently corrected in those that
followed. He appears to have revised the "Iliad," and freed it from
some of its imperfections; and the "Essay on Criticism" received
many improvements after its first appearance. It will seldom be
found that he altered without adding clearness, elegance, or vigour.
Pope had perhaps the judgment of Dryden; but Dryden certainly wanted
the diligence of Pope.
In acquired knowledge, the superiority must be allowed to Dryden,
whose education was more scholastic, and who before he became an
author had been allowed more time for study, with better means of
information. His mind has a larger range, and he collects his
images and illustrations from a more extensive circumference of
science. Dryden knew more of man in his general nature, and Pope in
his local manners. The notions of Dryden were formed by
comprehensive speculation, and those of Pope by minute attention.
There is more dignity in the knowledge of Dryden, and more certainty
in that of Pope. Poetry was not the sole praise of either; for both
excelled likewise in prose; but Pope did not borrow his prose from
his predecessor. The style of Dryden is capricious and varied; that
of Pope is cautious and uniform. Dryden observes the motions of his
own mind; Pope constrains his mind to his own rules of composition.
Dryden is sometimes vehement and rapid; Pope is always smooth,
uniform, and gentle. Dryden's page is a natural field, rising into
inequalities, and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant
vegetation; Pope's is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe, and
levelled by the roller.
Of genius, that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without
which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert; that energy which
collects, combines, amplifies, and animates; the superiority must,
with some hesitation, be allowed to Dryden. It is not to be
inferred that of this poetical vigour Pope had only a little,
because Dryden had more; for every other writer since Milton must
give place to Pope; and even of Dryden it must be said that, if he
has brighter paragraphs, he has not better poems. Dryden's
performances were always hasty, either excited by some external
occasion, or extorted by domestic necessity; he composed without
consideration, and published without correction. What his mind
could supply at call, or gather in one excursion, was all that he
sought, and all that he gave. The dilatory caution of Pope enabled
him to condense his sentiments, to multiply his images, and to
accumulate all that study might produce or chance might supply. If
the flights of Dryden therefore are higher, Pope continues longer on
the wing. If of Dryden's fire the blaze is brighter, of Pope's the
heat is more regular and constant. Dryden often surpasses
expectation, and Pope never falls below it. Dryden is read with
frequent astonishment, and Pope with perpetual delight. This
parallel will, I hope, when it is well considered, be found just;
and if the reader should suspect me, as I suspect myself, of some
partial fondness for the memory of Dryden, let him not too hastily
condemn me; for meditation and inquiry may, perhaps, show him the
reasonableness of my determination.
The Works of Pope are now to be distinctly examined, not so much
with attention to slight faults or petty beauties, as to the general
character and effect of each performance.
It seems natural for a young poet to initiate himself by pastorals,
which, not professing to imitate real life, require no experience;
and, exhibiting only the simple operation of unmingled passions,
admit no subtle reasoning or deep inquiry. Pope's pastorals are
not, however, composed but with close thought; they have reference
to the times of the day, the seasons of the year, and the periods of
human life. The last, that which turns the attention upon age and
death, was the author's favourite. To tell of disappointment and
misery, to thicken the darkness of futurity and perplex the
labyrinth of uncertainty, has been always a delicious employment of
the poets. His preference was probably just. I wish, however, that
his fondness had not overlooked a line in which the Zephyrs are made
to lament in silence. To charge these pastorals with wane of
invention, is to require what was never intended. The imitations
are so ambitiously frequent, that the writer evidently means rather
to show his literature than his wit. It is surely sufficient for an
author of sixteen, not only to be able to copy the poems of
antiquity with judicious selection, but to have obtained sufficient
power of language, and skill in metre, to exhibit a series of
versification which had in English poetry no precedent, nor has
since had an imitation.
The design of "Windsor Forest" is evidently derived from "Cooper's
Hill," with some attention to Waller's poem on "The Park;" but Pope
cannot be denied to excel his masters in variety and elegance, and
the art of interchanging description, narrative, and morality. The
objection made by Dennis is the want of plan, of a regular
subordination of parts terminating in the principal and original
design. There is this want in most descriptive poems, because as
the scenes, which they must exhibit successively, are all subsisting
at the same time, the order in which they are shown must by
necessity be arbitrary, and more is not to be expected from the last
part than from the first. The attention, therefore, which cannot be
detained by suspense, must be excited by diversity, such as this
poem offers to its reader. But the desire of diversity may be too
much indulged; the parts of "Windsor Forest" which deserve least
praise are those which were added to enliven the stillness of the
scene--the appearance of Father Thames, and the transformation of
Lodona. Addison had in his "Campaign" derided the rivers that "rise
from their oozy beds" to tell stories of heroes; and it is therefore
strange that Pope should adopt a fiction not only unnatural, but
lately censured. The story of Lodona is told with sweetness; but a
new metamorphosis is a ready and puerile expedient; nothing is
easier than to tell how a flower was once a blooming virgin, or a
rock an obdurate tyrant.
The "Temple of Fame" has, as Steele warmly declared, a "thousand
beauties." Every part is splendid; there is great luxuriance of
ornaments; the original vision of Chaucer was never denied to be
much improved; the allegory is very skilfully continued, the imagery
is properly selected, and learnedly displayed; yet, with all this
comprehension of excellence, as its scene is laid in remote ages,
and its sentiments, if the concluding paragraph be excepted, have
little relation to general manners or common life, it never obtained
much notice, but is turned silently over, and seldom quoted or
mentioned with either praise or blame.
That the "Messiah" excels the "Pollio" is no great praise, if it be
considered from what original the improvements are derived.
The "Verses on the Unfortunate Lady" have drawn much attention by
the illaudable singularity of treating suicide with respect; and
they must be allowed to be written in some parts with vigorous
animation, and in others with gentle tenderness; nor has Pope
produced any poem in which the sense predominates more over the
diction. But the tale is not skilfully told; it is not easy to
discover the character of either the lady or her guardian. History
relates that she was about to disparage herself by a marriage with
an inferior; Pope praises her for the dignity of ambition, and yet
condemns the uncle to detestation for his pride; the ambitious love
of a niece may be opposed by the interest, malice, or envy of an
uncle, but never by his pride. On such an occasion a poet may be
allowed to be obscure, but inconsistency never can be right.
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