Biographical Essays

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Biographical Essays

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19

Swift also he had virtually lost for ever. In April, 1727, this
unhappy man had visited Pope for the last time. During this visit
occurred the death of George I. Great expectations arose from that
event amongst the Tories, in which, of course,' Swift shared. It
was reckoned upon as a thing of course that Walpole would be
dismissed. But this bright gleam of hope proved as treacherous as
all before; and the anguish of this final disappointment perhaps it
was which brought on a violent attack of Swift's constitutional
malady. On the last of August he quitted Pope's house abruptly,
concealed himself in London, and finally quitted it, as stealthily
as he had before quitted Twickenham, for Ireland, never more to
return. He left a most affectionate letter for Pope; but his
affliction, and his gloomy anticipations of insanity, were too
oppressive to allow of his seeking a personal interview.

Pope might now describe himself pretty nearly as _ultimus
suorum_; and if he would have friends in future, he must seek
them, as he complains bitterly, almost amongst strangers and
another generation. This sense of desolation may account for the
acrimony which too much disfigures his writings henceforward.
Between 1732 and 1740, he was chiefly engaged in satires, which
uniformly speak a high moral tone in the midst of personal
invective; or in poems directly philosophical, which almost as
uniformly speak the bitter tone of satire in the midst of
dispassionate ethics. His Essay on Man was but one link in a
general course which he had projected of moral philosophy, here and
there pursuing his themes into the fields of metaphysics, but no
farther in either field of morals or metaphysics than he could make
compatible with a poetical treatment. These works, however,
naturally entangled him in feuds of various complexions with people
of very various pretensions; and to admirers of Pope so fervent as
we profess ourselves, it is painful to acknowledge that the dignity
of his latter years, and the becoming tranquillity of increasing
age, are sadly disturbed by the petulance and the tone of
irritation which, alike to those in the wrong and in the right,
inevitably besiege all personal disputes. He was agitated, besides,
by a piratical publication of his correspondence. This emanated of
course from the den of Curll, the universal robber and "_blatant
beast_" of those days; and, besides the injury offered to his
feelings by exposing some youthful sallies which he wished to have
suppressed, it drew upon him a far more disgraceful imputation,
most assuredly unfounded, but accredited by Dr. Johnson, and
consequently in full currency to this day, of having acted
collusively with Curll, or at least through Curll, for the
publication of what he wished the world to see, but could not else
have devised any decent pretext for exhibiting. The disturbance of
his mind on this occasion led to a circular request, dispersed
amongst his friends, that they would return his letters. All
complied except Swift. He only delayed, and in fact shuffled. But
it is easy to read in his evasions, and Pope, in spite of his
vexation, read the same tale, viz., that, in consequence of his
recurring attacks and increasing misery, he was himself the victim
of artifices amongst those who surrounded him. What Pope
apprehended happened.

The letters were all published in Dublin and in London, the
originals being then only returned when they had done their work of
exposure.

Such a tenor of life, so constantly fretted by petty wrongs, or by
leaden insults, to which only the celebrity of their object lent
force or wings, allowed little opportunity to Pope for recalling
his powers from angry themes, and converging them upon others of
more catholic philosophy. To the last he continued to conceal
vipers beneath his flowers; or rather, speaking proportionately to
the case, he continued to sheath amongst the gleaming but innocuous
lightnings of his departing splendors, the thunderbolts which
blasted for ever. His last appearance was his greatest. In 1742 he
published the fourth book of the Dunciad; to which it has with much
reason been objected, that it stands in no obvious relation to the
other three, but which, taken as a separate whole, is by far the
most brilliant and the weightiest of his works. Pope was aware of
the _hiatus_ between this last book and the rest, on which
account he sometimes called it the greater Dunciad; and it would
have been easy for him, with a shallow Warburtonian ingenuity, to
invent links that might have satisfied a mere _verbal_ sense
of connection. But he disdained this puerile expedient. The fact
was, and could not be disguised from any penetrating eye, that the
poem was not a pursuit of the former subjects; it had arisen
spontaneously at various times, by looking at the same general
theme of dulness (which, in Pope's sense, includes all aberrations
of the intellect, nay, even any defective equilibrium amongst the
faculties) under a different angle of observation, and from a
different centre. In this closing book, not only bad authors, as in
the other three, but all abuses of science or antiquarian
knowledge, or connoisseurship in the arts, are attacked. Virtuosi,
medalists, butterfly-hunters, florists, erring metaphysicians, &c.,
are all pierced through and through as with the shafts of Apollo.
But the imperfect plan of the work as to its internal economy, no
less than its exterior relations, is evident in many places; and in
particular the whole catastrophe of the poem, if it can be so
called, is linked to the rest by a most insufficient incident. To
give a closing grandeur to his work, Pope had conceived the idea of
representing the earth as lying universally under the incubation of
one mighty spirit of dulness; a sort of millennium, as we may call
it, for ignorance, error, and stupidity. This would take leave of
the reader with effect; but how was it to be introduced? at what
era? under what exciting cause? As to the eras, Pope could not
settle that; unless it were a _future_ era, the description of
it could not be delivered as a prophecy; and, not being prophetic,
it would want much of its grandeur. Yet, _as_ a part of
futurity, how is it connected with our present times? Do they and
their pursuits lead to it as a possibility, or as a contingency
upon certain habits which we have it in our power to eradicate, (in
which case this vision of dulness has a _practical_ warning,)
or is it a mere necessity, one amongst the many changes attached to
the cycles of human destiny, or which chance brings round with the
revolutions of its wheel? All this Pope could not determine; but
the exciting cause he has determined, and it is preposterously
below the effect. The goddess of dulness yawns; and her yawn,
which, after all, should rather express the fact and state of
universal dulness than its cause, produces a change over all
nations tantamount to a long eclipse. Meantime, with all its
defects of plan, the poem, as to execution, is superior to all
which Pope has done; the composition is much superior to that of
the Essay on Man, and more profoundly poetic. The parodies drawn
from Milton, as also in the former books, have a beauty and effect
which cannot be expressed; and, if a young lady wished to cull for
her album a passage from all Pope's writings, which, without a
trace of irritation or acrimony, should yet present an exquisite
gem of independent beauty, she could not find another passage equal
to the little story of the florist and the butterfly-hunter. They
plead their cause separately before the throne of dulness; the
florist telling how he had reared a superb carnation, which, in
honor of the queen, he called Caroline, when his enemy, pursuing a
butterfly which settled on the carnation, in securing his own
object, had destroyed that of the plaintiff. The defendant replies
with equal beauty; and it may certainly be affirmed, that, for
brilliancy of coloring and the art of poetical narration, the tale
is not surpassed by any in the language.

This was the last effort of Pope worthy of separate notice. He was
now decaying rapidly, and sensible of his own decay. His complaint
was a dropsy of the chest, and he knew it to be incurable. Under
these circumstances, his behavior was admirably philosophical. He
employed himself in revising and burnishing all his later works, as
those upon which he wisely relied for his reputation with future
generations. In this task he was assisted by Dr. Warburton, a new
literary friend, who had introduced himself to the favorable notice
of Pope about four years before, by a defence of the Essay on Man,
which Crousaz had attacked, but in general indirectly and
ineffectually, by attacking it through the blunders of a very
faulty translation. This poem, however, still labors, to religious
readers, under two capital defects. If man, according to Pope, is
now so admirably placed in the universal system of things, that
evil only could result from any change, then it seems to follow,
either that a fall of man is inadmissible; or at least, that, by
placing him in his true centre, it had been a blessing universally.
The other objection lies in this, that if all is right already, and
in this earthly station, then one argument for a future state, as
the scene in which evil is to be redressed, seems weakened or
undermined.

As the weakness of Pope increased, his nearest friends, Lord
Bolingbroke, and a few others, gathered around him. The last scenes
were passed almost with ease and tranquillity. He dined in company
two days before he died: and on the very day preceding his death he
took an airing on Blackheath. A few mornings before he died, he was
found very early in his library writing on the immortality of the
soul. This was an effort of delirium; and he suffered otherwise
from this affection of the brain, and from inability to think in
his closing hours. But his humanity and goodness, it was remarked,
had survived his intellectual faculties. He died on the 30th of
May, 1744; and so quietly, that the attendants could not
distinguish the exact moment of his dissolution.

We had prepared an account of Pope's quarrels, in which we had
shown that, generally, he was not the aggressor; and often was
atrociously ill used before he retorted. This service to Pope's
memory we had judged important, because it is upon these quarrels
chiefly that the erroneous opinion has built itself of Pope's
fretfulness and irritability. And this unamiable feature of his
nature, together with a proneness to petty manoeuvring, are the
main foibles that malice has been able to charge upon Pope's moral
character. Yet, with no better foundation for their malignity than
these doubtful propensities, of which the first perhaps was a
constitutional defect, a defect of his temperament rather than his
will, and the second has been much exaggerated, many writers have
taken upon themselves to treat Pope as a man, if not absolutely
unprincipled and without moral sensibility, yet as mean,
little-minded, indirect, splenetic, vindictive, and morose. Now the
difference between ourselves and these writers is fundamental. They
fancy that in Pope's character a basis of ignoble qualities was
here and there slightly relieved by a few shining spots; we, on the
contrary, believe that in Pope lay a disposition radically noble
and generous, clouded and overshadowed by superficial foibles, or,
to adopt the distinction of Shakspeare, they see nothing but "dust
a little gilt," and we "gold a little dusted." A very rapid glance
we will throw over the general outline of his character.

As a friend, it is noticed emphatically by Martha Blount and other
contemporaries, who must have had the best means of judging, that
no man was so warm-hearted, or so much sacrificed himself for
others, as Pope; and in fact many of his quarrels grew out of this
trait in his character. For once that he levelled his spear in his
own quarrel, at least twice he did so on behalf of his insulted
parents or his friends. Pope was also noticeable for the duration
of his friendships; [Endnote: 11] some dropped him,--but he never
any throughout his life. And let it be remembered, that amongst
Pope's friends were the men of most eminent talents in those days;
so that envy at least, or jealousy of rival power, was assuredly no
foible of his. In that respect how different from Addison, whose
petty manoeuvring against Pope proceeded entirely from malignant
jealousy. That Addison was more in the wrong even than has
generally been supposed, and Pope more thoroughly innocent as well
as more generous, we have the means at a proper opportunity of
showing decisively. As a son, we need not insist on Pope's
preeminent goodness. Dean Swift, who had lived for months together
at Twickenham, declares that he had not only never witnessed, but
had never heard of anything like it. As a Christian, Pope appears
in a truly estimable light. He found himself a Roman Catholic by
accident of birth; so was his mother; but his father was so upon
personal conviction and conversion, yet not without extensive study
of the questions at issue. It would have laid open the road to
preferment, and preferment was otherwise abundantly before him, if
Pope would have gone over to the Protestant faith. And in his
conscience he found no obstacle to that change; he was a
philosophical Christian, intolerant of nothing but intolerance, a
bigot only against bigots. But he remained true to his baptismal
profession, partly on a general principle of honor in adhering to a
distressed and dishonored party, but chiefly out of reverence and
affection to his mother. In his relation to women, Pope was amiable
and gentlemanly; and accordingly was the object of affectionate
regard and admiration to many of the most accomplished in that sex.
This we mention especially because we would wish to express our
full assent to the manly scorn with which Mr. Roscoe repels the
libellous insinuations against Pope and Miss Martha Blount. A more
innocent connection we do not believe ever existed. As an author,
Warburton has recorded that no man ever displayed more candor or
more docility to criticisms offered in a friendly spirit. Finally,
we sum up all in saying, that Pope retained to the last a true and
diffusive benignity; that this was the quality which survived all
others, notwithstanding the bitter trial which his benignity must
have stood through life, and the excitement to a spiteful reaction
of feeling which was continually pressed upon him by the scorn and
insult which his deformity drew upon him from the unworthy.

But the moral character of Pope is of secondary interest. We are
concerned with it only as connected with his great intellectual
power. There are three errors which seem current upon this subject.
_First_, that Pope drew his impulses from French literature;
_secondly_, that he was a poet of inferior rank;
_thirdly_, that his merit lies in superior "correctness." With
respect to the first notion, it has prevailed by turns in every
literature. One stage of society, in every nation, brings men of
impassioned minds to the contemplation of manners, and of the
social affections of man as exhibited in manners. With this
propensity cooperates, no doubt, some degree of despondency when
looking at the great models of the literature who have usually
preoccupied the grander passions, and displayed their movements in
the earlier periods of literature. Now it happens that the French,
from an extraordinary defect in the higher qualities of passion,
have attracted the notice of foreign nations chiefly to that field
of their literature, in which the taste and the unimpassioned
understanding preside. But in all nations such literature is a
natural growth of the mind, and would arise equally if the French
literature had never existed. The wits of Queen Anne's reign, or
even of Charles II.'s, were not French by their taste or their
imitation. Butler and Dryden were surely not French; and of Milton
we need not speak; as little was Pope French, either by his
institution or by his models. Boileau he certainly admired too
much; and, for the sake of a poor parallelism with a passage about
Greece in Horace, he has falsified history in the most ludicrous
manner, without a shadow of countenance from facts, in order to
make out that we, like the Romans, received laws of taste from
those whom we had conquered. But these are insulated cases and
accidents, not to insist on his known and most profound admiration,
often expressed, for both Chaucer, and Shakspeare, and Milton.
Secondly, that Pope is to be classed as an inferior poet, has
arisen purely from a confusion between the departments of poetry
which he cultivated and the merit of his culture. The first place
must undoubtedly be given for ever,--it cannot be refused,--to the
impassioned movements of the tragic, and to the majestic movements
of the epic muse. We cannot alter the relations of things out of
favor to an individual. But in his own department, whether higher
or lower, that man is supreme who has not yet been surpassed; and
such a man is Pope. As to the final notion, first started by Walsh,
and propagated by Warton, it is the most absurd of all the three;
it is not from superior correctness that Pope is esteemed more
correct, but because the compass and sweep of his performances lies
more within the range of ordinary judgments. Many questions that
have been raised upon Milton or Shakspeare, questions relating to
so subtile a subject as the flux and reflux of human passion, lie
far above the region of ordinary capacities; and the
indeterminateness or even carelessness of the judgment is
transferred by a common confusion to its objects. But waiving this,
let us ask, what is meant by "correctness?" Correctness in what? In
developing the thought? In connecting it, or effecting the
transitions? In the use of words? In the grammar? In the metre?
Under every one of these limitations of the idea, we maintain that
Pope is _not_ distinguished by correctness; nay, that, as
compared with Shakspeare, he is eminently incorrect. Produce us
from any drama of Shakspeare one of those leading passages that all
men have by heart, and show us any eminent defect in the very
sinews of the thought. It is impossible; defects there may be, but
they will always be found irrelevant to the main central thought,
or to its expression. Now turn to Pope; the first striking passage
which offers itself to our memory, is the famous character of
Addison, ending thus:

"Who would not laugh, if such a man there be,
Who but must weep if Atticus were he?"

Why must we laugh? Because we find a grotesque assembly of noble
and ignoble qualities. Very well; but why then must we weep?
Because this assemblage is found actually existing in an eminent
man of genius. Well, that is a good reason for weeping; we weep for
the degradation of human nature. But then revolves the question,
why must we laugh? Because, if the belonging to a man of genius
were a sufficient reason for weeping, so much we know from the very
first. The very first line says, "Peace to all such. But were there
one whose fires _true genius kindles_ and fair fame inspires."
Thus falls to the ground the whole antithesis of this famous
character. We are to change our mood from laughter to tears upon a
sudden discovery that the character belonged to a man of genius;
and this we had already known from the beginning. Match us this
prodigious oversight in Shakspeare. Again, take the Essay on
Criticism. It is a collection of independent maxims, tied together
into a fasciculus by the printer, but having no natural order or
logical dependency; generally so vague as to mean nothing. Like the
general rules of justice, &c., in ethics, to which every man
assents; but when the question comes about any practical case,
_is_ it just? The opinions fly asunder far as the poles. And,
what is remarkable, many of the rules are violated by no man so
often as by Pope, and by Pope nowhere so often as in this very
poem. As a single instance, he proscribes monosyllabic lines; and
in no English poem of any pretensions are there so many lines of
that class as in this. We have counted above a score, and the last
line of all is monosyllabic.

Not, therefore, for superior correctness, but for qualities the
very same as belong to his most distinguished brethren, is Pope to
be considered a great poet; for impassioned thinking, powerful
description, pathetic reflection, brilliant narration. His
characteristic difference is simply that he carried these powers
into a different field, and moved chiefly amongst the social paths
of men, and viewed their characters as operating through their
manners. And our obligations to him arise chiefly on this ground,
that having already, in the persons of earlier poets, carried off
the palm in all the grander trials of intellectual strength, for
the majesty of the epopee and the impassioned vehemence of the
tragic drama, to Pope we owe it that we can now claim an equal
preeminence in the sportive and aerial graces of the mock heroic
and satiric muse; that in the Dunciad we possess a peculiar form of
satire, in which (according to a plan unattempted by any other
nation) we see alternately her festive smile and her gloomiest
scowl; that the grave good sense of the nation has here found its
brightest mirror; and, finally, that through Pope the cycle of our
poetry is perfected and made orbicular, that from that day we might
claim the laurel equally, whether for dignity or grace.

NOTES.

NOTE 1.

Dr. Johnson, however, and Joseph Warton, for reasons not stated,
have placed his birth on the 22d. To this statement, as opposed to
that which comes from the personal friends of Pope, little
attention is due. Ruffhead and Spence, upon such questions, must
always be of higher authority than Johnson and Warton, and _a
fortiori_ than Bowles. But it ought not to be concealed, though
hitherto unnoticed by any person, that some doubt after all remains
whether any of the biographers is right. An anonymous writer,
contemporary with Pope, and evidently familiar with his personal
history, declares that he was born on the 8th of June; and he
connects it with an event that, having a public and a partisan
interest, (the birth of that Prince of Wales, who was known
twenty-seven years afterwards as the Pretender,) would serve to
check his own recollections, and give them a collateral voucher. It
is true he wrote for an ill-natured purpose; but no purpose
whatever could have been promoted by falsifying this particular
date. What is still more noticeable, however, Pope himself puts a
most emphatic negative upon all these statements. In a pathetic
letter to a friend, when his attention could not have been
wandering, for he is expressly insisting upon a sentiment which
will find an echo in many a human heart, viz., that a birthday,
though from habit usually celebrated as a festal day, too often is
secretly a memorial of disappointment, and an anniversary of
sorrowful meaning, he speaks of the very day on which he is then
writing as his own birthday; and indeed what else could give any
propriety to the passage? Now the date of this letter is January 1,
1733. Surely Pope knew his own birthday better than those who have
adopted a random rumor without investigation.

But, whilst we are upon this subject, we must caution the readers
of Pope against too much reliance upon the chronological accuracy
of his editors. _All_ are scandalously careless; and generally
they are faithless. Many allusions are left unnoticed, which a very
little research would have illustrated; many facts are omitted,
even yet recoverable, which are essential to the just appreciation
of Pope's satirical blows; and dates are constantly misstated. Mr.
Roscoe is the most careful of Pope's editors; but even he is often
wrong. For instance, he has taken the trouble to write a note upon
Pope's humorous report to Lord Burlington of his Oxford journey on
horseback with Lintot; and this note involves a sheer
impossibility. The letter is undated, except as to the month; and
Mr. Roscoe directs the reader to supply 1714 as the true date,
which is a gross anachronism. For a ludicrous anecdote is there put
into Lintot's mouth, representing some angry critic, who had been
turning over Pope's Homer, with frequent _pshaws_, as having
been propitiated, by Mr. Lintot's dinner, into a gentler feeling
towards Pope, and, finally, by the mere effect of good cheer,
without an effort on the publisher's part, as coming to a
confession, that what he ate and what he had been reading were
equally excellent. But in the year 1714, _no part_ of Pope's
Homer was printed; June, 1715, was the month in which even the
subscribers first received the four earliest books of the Iliad;
and the public generally not until July. This we notice by way of
specimen; in itself, or as an error of mere negligence, it would be
of little importance; but it is a case to which Mr. Roscoe has
expressly applied his own conjectural skill, and solicited the
attention of his reader. We may judge, therefore, of his accuracy
in other cases which he did not think worthy of examination.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19