Biographical Essays

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NOTE 21.

It will occur to many readers, that perhaps Homer may furnish the
sole exception to this sweeping assertion. Any _but_ Homer is
clearly and ludicrously below the level of the competition, but
even Homer "with his tail on," (as the Scottish Highlanders say of
then chieftains when belted by their ceremonial retinues,) musters
nothing like the force which _already_ follows Shakspeare, and
be it remembered, that Homer sleeps and has long slept as a subject
of criticism or commentary, while in Germany as well as England,
and _now even in France_, the gathering of wits to the vast
equipage of Shakspeare is advancing in an accelerated ratio. There
is, in fact, a great delusion current upon this subject.
Innumerable references to Homer, and brief critical remarks on
this or that pretension of Homer, this or that scene, this or that
passage, lie scattered over literature ancient and modern; but the
express works dedicated to the separate service of Homer are, after
all, not many. In Greek we have only the large Commentary of
Eustathius, and the Scholia of Didymus, &c.; in French little or
nothing before the prose translation of the seventeenth century,
which Pope esteemed "elegant, "and the skirmishings of Madame
Dacier, La Motte, &c.; in English, besides the various translations
and their prefaces, (which, by the way, began as early as 1555,)
nothing of much importance until the elaborate preface of Pope to
the Iliad, and his elaborate postscript to the Odyssey--nothing
certainly before that, and very little indeed since that, except
Wood's Essay on the Life and Genius of Homer. On the other hand, of
the books written in illustration or investigation of Shakspeare, a
very considerable library might be formed in England, and another
in Germany.

NOTE 22.

Apartment is here used, as the reader will observe, in its true and
continental acceptation, as a division or _compartment_ of a
house including many rooms; a suite of chambers, but a suite which
is partitioned off, (as in palaces,) not a single chamber; a sense
so commonly and so erroneously given to this word in England.

NOTE 23.

And hence, by parity of reason, under the opposite circumstances,
under the circumstances which, instead of abolishing, most
emphatically drew forth the sexual distinctions, viz., in the
_comic_ aspects of social intercourse, the reason that we see
no women on the Greek stage; the Greek Comedy, unless when it
affects the extravagant fun of farce, rejects women.

NOTE 24.

It may be thought, however, by some readers, that Aeschylus, in his
fine phantom of Darius, has approached the English ghost. As a
foreign ghost, we would wish (and we are sure that our excellent
readers would wish) to show every courtesy and attention to this
apparition of Darius. It has the advantage of being royal, an
advantage which it shares with the ghost of the royal Dane. Yet how
different, how removed by a total world, from that or any of
Shakspeare's ghosts! Take that of Banquo, for instance. How
shadowy, how unreal, yet how real! Darius is a mere state ghost--a
diplomatic ghost. But Banquo--he exists only for Macbeth; the
guests do not see him, yet how solemn, how real, how
heart--searching he is.

NOTE 25.

Caliban has not yet been thoroughly fathomed. For all Shakspeare's
great creations are like works of nature, subjects of unexhaustible
study. It was this character of whom Charles I. and some of his
ministers expressed such fervent admiration; and, among other
circumstances, most justly they admired the new language almost
with which he is endowed, for the purpose of expressing his
fiendish and yet carnal thoughts of hatred to his master. Caliban
is evidently not meant for scorn, but for abomination mixed with
fear and partial respect. He is purposely brought into contrast
with the drunken Trinculo and Stephano, with an advantageous
result. He is much more intellectual than either, uses a more
elevated language, not disfigured by vulgarisms, and is not liable
to the low passion for plunder as they are. He is mortal,
doubtless, as his "dam" (for Shakspeare will not call her mother)
Sycorax. But he inherits from her such qualities of power as a
witch could be supposed to bequeath. He trembles indeed before
Prospero; but that is, as we are to understand, through the moral
superiority of Prospero in Christian wisdom; for when he finds
himself in the presence of dissolute and unprincipled men, he rises
at once into the dignity of intellectual power.

POPE.

Alexander Lexander Pope, the most brilliant of all wits who have at
any
period applied themselves to the poetic treatment of human manners,
to the selecting from the play of human character what is
picturesque, or the arresting what is fugitive, was born in the
city of London on the 21st day of May, in the memorable year 1688;
about six months, therefore, before the landing of the Prince of
Orange, and the opening of that great revolution which gave the
final ratification to all previous revolutions of that tempestuous
century. By the "city" of London the reader is to understand us as
speaking with technical accuracy of that district, which lies
within the ancient walls and the jurisdiction of the lord mayor.
The parents of Pope, there is good reason to think, were of "gentle
blood," which is the expression of the poet himself when describing
them in verse. His mother was so undoubtedly; and her illustrious
son, in speaking of her to Lord Harvey, at a time when any
exaggeration was open to an easy refutation, and writing in a
spirit most likely to provoke it, does not scruple to say, with a
tone of dignified haughtiness not unbecoming the situation of a
filial champion on behalf of an insulted mother, that by birth and
descent she was not below that young lady, (one of the two
beautiful Miss Lepels,) whom his lordship had selected from all the
choir of court beauties as the future mother of his children. Of
Pope's extraction and immediate lineage for a space of two
generations we know enough. Beyond that we know little. Of this
little a part is dubious; and what we are disposed to receive as
_not_ dubious, rests chiefly on his own authority. In the
prologue to his Satires, having occasion to notice the lampooners
of the times, who had represented his father as "a mechanic, a
hatter, a farmer, nay a bankrupt," he feels himself called upon to
state the truth about his parents; and naturally much more so at a
time when the low scurrilities of these obscure libellers had been
adopted, accredited, and diffused by persons so distinguished in
all points of personal accomplishment and rank as Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu and Lord Harvey: _"hard as thy heart"_ was one of the
lines in their joint pasquinade, _" hard as thy heart, and as thy
birth obscure."_ Accordingly he makes the following formal
statement: "Mr. Pope's father was of a gentleman's family in
Oxfordshire, the head of which was the Earl of Downe. His mother
was the daughter of William Turner, Esq., of York. She had three
brothers, one of whom was killed; another died in the service of
King Charles [meaning Charles I.]; the eldest, following his
fortunes, and becoming a general officer in Spain, left _her_
what estate remained after the sequestrations and forfeitures of
her family." The sequestrations here spoken of were those inflicted
by the commissioners for the parliament; and usually they levied a
fifth, or even two fifths, according to the apparent delinquency of
the parties. But in such cases two great differences arose in the
treatment of the royalists; first, that the report was colored
according to the interest which a man possessed, or other private
means for biassing the commissioners; secondly, that often, when
money could not be raised on mortgage to meet the sequestration, it
became necessary to sell a family estate suddenly, and. therefore
in those times at great loss; so that a nominal fifth might be
depressed by favor to a tenth, or raised by the necessity of
selling to a half. And hence might arise the small dowry of Mrs.
Pope, notwithstanding the family estate in Yorkshire had centred in
her person. But, by the way, we see from the fact of the eldest
brother having sought service in Spain, that Mrs. Pope was a
Papist; not, like her husband, by conversion, but by hereditary
faith. This account, as publicly thrown out in the way of challenge
by Pope, was, however, sneered at by a certain Mr. Pottinger of
those days, who, together with his absurd name, has been safely
transmitted to posterity in connection with this single feat of
having contradicted Alexander Pope. We read in a diary published by
the Microcosm," _Met a large hat, with a man under it_. "And
so, here, we cannot so properly say that Mr. Pottinger brings down
the contradiction to our times, as that the contradiction brings
down Mr. Pottinger." Cousin Pope, "said Pottinger," had made
himself out a fine pedigree, but he wondered where he got it. "And
he then goes on to plead in abatement of Pope's pretensions," that
an old maiden aunt, equally related," (that is, standing in the
same relation to himself and to the poet,) "a great genealogist, who
was always talking of her family, never mentioned this
circumstance." And again we are told, from another quarter, that
the Earl of Guildford, after express investigation of this matter,
"was sure that," amongst the descendants of the Earls of Downe,
"there was none of the name of Pope." How it was that Lord
Guildford came to have any connection with the affair, is not
stated by the biographers of Pope; but we have ascertained that, by
marriage with a female descendant from the Earls of Downe, he had
come into possession of their English estates.

Finally, though it is rather for the honor of the Earls of Downe
than of Pope to make out the connection, we must observe that Lord
Guildford's testimony, _if ever given at all_, is simply
negative; he had found no proofs of the connection, but he had not
found any proofs to destroy it; whilst, on the other hand, it ought
to be mentioned, though unaccountably overlooked by all previous
biographers, that one of Pope's anonymous enemies, who hated him
personally, but was apparently master of his family history, and
too honorable to belie his own convictions, expressly affirms of
his own authority, and without reference to any claim put forward
by Pope, that he was descended from a junior branch of the Downe
family. Which testimony has a double value; first, as corroborating
the probability of Pope's statement viewed in the light of a fact;
and, secondly, as corroborating that same statement viewed in the
light of a current story, true or false, and not as a disingenuous
fiction put forward by Pope to confute Lord Harvey.

It is probable to us, that the Popes, who had been originally
transplanted from England to Ireland, had in the person of some
cadet been re-transplanted to England; and that having in that way
been disconnected from all personal recognition, and all local
memorials of the capital house, by this sort of
_postliminium_, the junior branch had ceased to cherish the
honor of a descent which was now divided from all direct advantage.
At all events, the researches of Pope's biographers have not been
able to trace him farther back in the paternal line than to his
grandfather; and he (which is odd enough, considering the popery of
his descendants) was a clergyman of the established church in
Hampshire. This grandfather had two sons. Of the eldest nothing is
recorded beyond the three facts, that he went to Oxford, that he
died there, and that he spent the family estate. [Endnote: 2] The
younger son, whose name was Alexander, had been sent when young, in
some commercial character, to Lisbon; [Endnote: 3] and there it
was, in that centre of bigotry, that he became a sincere and most
disinterested Catholic. He returned to England; married a Catholic
young widow; and became the father of a second Alexander Pope,
_ultra Sauromatas notus et Antipodes._

By his own account to Spence, Pope learned "very early to read;"
and writing he taught himself "by copying, from printed books;"
all which seems to argue, that, as an only child, with an indolent
father and a most indulgent mother, he was not molested with much
schooling in his infancy. Only one adventure is recorded of his
childhood, viz., that he was attacked by a cow, thrown down, and
wounded in the throat.

Pope escaped this disagreeable kind of vaccination without serious
injury, and was not farther tormented by cows or schoolmasters
until he was about eight years old, when the family priest, that
is, we presume, the confessor of his parents, taught him, agreeably
to the Jesuit system, the rudiments of Greek and Latin
concurrently. This priest was named Banister; and his name is
frequently employed, together with other fictitious names, by way
of signature to the notes in the Dunciad, an artifice which was
adopted for the sake of giving a characteristic variety to the
notes, according to the tone required for the illustration of the
text. From his tuition Pope was at length dismissed to a Catholic
school at Twyford, near Winchester. The selection of a school in
this neighborhood, though certainly the choice of a Catholic family
was much limited, points apparently to the old Hampshire connection
of his father. Here an incident occurred which most powerfully
illustrates the original and constitutional determination to satire
of this irritable poet. He knew himself so accurately, that in
after times, half by way of boast, half of confession, he says,

"But touch me, and no Minister so sore:
Whoe'er offends, at some unlucky time
Slides into verse and hitches in a rhyme,
Sacred to ridicule his whole life long,
And the sad burthen of some merry song."

Already, it seems, in childhood he had the same irresistible
instinct, victorious over the strongest sense of personal danger.
He wrote a bitter satire upon the presiding pedagogue, was brutally
punished for this youthful indiscretion, and indignantly removed by
his parents from the school. Mr. Roscoe speaks of Pope's personal
experience as necessarily unfavorable to public schools; but in
reality he knew nothing of public schools. All the establishments
for Papists were narrow, and suited to their political depression;
and his parents were too sincerely anxious for their son's
religious principles to risk the contagion of Protestant
association by sending him elsewhere.

From the scene [Endnote: 4] of his disgrace and illiberal
punishment, he passed, according to the received accounts, under
the tuition of several other masters in rapid succession. But it is
the less necessary to trouble the reader with their names, as Pope
himself assures us, that he learned nothing from any of them. To
Banister he had been indebted for such trivial elements of a
schoolboy's learning as he possessed at all, excepting those which
he had taught himself. And upon himself it was, and his own
admirable faculties, that he was now finally thrown for the rest of
his education, at an age so immature that many boys are then first
entering their academic career. Pope is supposed to have been
scarcely twelve years old when he assumed the office of
self-tuition, and bade farewell for ever to schools and tutors.

Such a phenomenon is at any rate striking. It is the more so, under
the circumstances which attended the plan, and under the results
which justified its execution. It seems, as regards the plan,
hardly less strange that prudent parents should have acquiesced in
a scheme of so much peril to his intellectual interests, than that
the son, as regards the execution, should have justified their
confidence by his final success. More especially this confidence
surprises us in the father. A doating mother might shut her eyes to
all remote evils in the present gratification to her affections;
but Pope's father was a man of sense and principle; he must have
weighed the risks besetting a boy left to his own intellectual
guidance; and to these risks he would allow the more weight from
his own conscious defect of scholarship and inability to guide or
even to accompany his son's studies. He could neither direct the
proper choice of studies; nor in any one study taken separately
could he suggest the proper choice of books.

The case we apprehend to have been this. Alexander Pope, the elder,
was a man of philosophical desires and unambitious character. Quiet
and seclusion and innocence of life,--these were what he affected
for himself; and that which had been found available for his own
happiness, he might reasonably wish for his son. The two hinges
upon which his plans may be supposed to have turned, were, first,
the political degradation of his sect; and, secondly, the fact that
his son was an only child. Had he been a Protestant, or had he,
though a Papist, been burthened with a large family of children, he
would doubtless have pursued a different course. But to him, and,
as he sincerely hoped, to his son, the strife after civil honors
was sternly barred. Apostasy only could lay it open. And, as the
sentiments of honor and duty in this point fell in with the vices
of his temperament, high principle concurring with his
constitutional love of ease, we need not wonder that he should
early retire from commerce with a very moderate competence, or that
he should suppose the same fortune sufficient for one who was to
stand in the same position. This son was from his birth deformed.
That made it probable that he might not marry. If he should, and
happened to have children, a small family would find an adequate
provision in the patrimonial funds; and a large one at the worst
could only throw him upon the same commercial exertions to which he
had been obliged himself. The Roman Catholics, indeed, were just
then situated as our modern Quakers are. Law to the one, as
conscience to the other, closed all modes of active employment
except that of commercial industry. Either his son, therefore,
would be a rustic recluse, or, like himself, he would be a
merchant.

With such prospects, what need of an elaborate education? And where
was such an education to be sought? At the petty establishments of
the suffering Catholics, the instruction, as he had found
experimentally, was poor. At the great national establishments his
son would be a degraded person; one who was permanently repelled
from every arena of honor, and sometimes, as in cases of public
danger, was banished from the capital, deprived of his house, left
defenceless against common ruffians, and rendered liable to the
control of every village magistrate. To one in these circumstances
solitude was the wisest position, and the best qualification, for
that was an education that would furnish aids to solitary thought.
No need for brilliant accomplishments to him who must never display
them; forensic arts, pulpit erudition, senatorial eloquence,
academical accomplishments--these would be lost to one against whom
the courts, the pulpit, the senate, the universities, were closed.
Nay, by possibility worse than lost; they might prove so many
snares or positive bribes to apostasy. Plain English, therefore,
and the high thinking of his compatriot authors, might prove the
best provision for the mind of an English Papist destined to
seclusion.

Such are the considerations under which we read and interpret the
conduct of Pope's parents; and they lead us to regard as wise and
conscientious a scheme which, under ordinary circumstances, would
have been pitiably foolish. And be it remembered, that to these
considerations, derived exclusively from the civil circumstances of
the family, were superadded others derived from the astonishing
prematurity of the individual. That boy who could write at twelve
years of age the beautiful and touching stanzas on Solitude, might
well be trusted with the superintendence of his own studies. And
the stripling of sixteen, who could so far transcend in good sense
the accomplished statesmen or men of the world with whom he
afterwards corresponded, might challenge confidence for such a
choice of books as would best promote the development of his own
faculties.

In reality, one so finely endowed as Alexander Pope, could not
easily lose his way in the most extensive or ill-digested library.
And though he tells Atterbury, that at one time he abused his
opportunities by reading controversial divinity, we may be sure
that his own native activities, and the elasticity of his mind,
would speedily recoil into a just equilibrium of study, under wider
and happier opportunities. Reading, indeed, for a person like Pope,
is rather valuable as a means of exciting his own energies, and of
feeding his own sensibilities, than for any direct acquisitions of
knowledge, or for any trains of systematic research. All men are
destined to devour much rubbish between the cradle and the grave;
and doubtless the man who is wisest in the choice of his books,
will have read many a page before he dies that a thoughtful review
would pronounce worthless. This is the fate of all men. But the
reading of Pope, as a general result or measure of his judicious
choice, is best justified in his writings. They show him well
furnished with whatsoever he wanted for matter or for
embellishment, for argument or illustration, for example and model,
or for direct and explicit imitation.

Possibly, as we have already suggested, within the range of English
literature Pope might have found all that he wanted. But variety
the widest has its uses; and, for the extension of his influence
with the polished classes amongst whom he lived, he did wisely to
add other languages; and a question has thus arisen with regard to
the extent of Pope's attainments as a self-taught linguist. A man,
or even a boy, of great originality, may happen to succeed best, in
working his own native mines of thought, by his unassisted
energies. Here it is granted that a tutor, a guide, or even a
companion, may be dispensed with, and even beneficially. But in the
case of foreign languages, in attaining this machinery of
literature, though anomalies even here do arise, and men there are,
like Joseph Scaliger, who form their own dictionaries and grammars
in the mere process of reading an unknown language, by far the
major part of students will lose their time by rejecting the aid of
tutors. As there has been much difference of opinion with regard to
Pope's skill in languages, we shall briefly collate and bring into
one focus the stray notices.

As to the French, Voltaire, who knew Pope personally, declared that
he "could hardly _read_ it, and spoke not one syllable of the
language." But perhaps Voltaire might dislike Pope? On the
contrary, he was acquainted with his works, and admired them to the
very level of their merits. Speaking of him _after death_ to
Frederick of Prussia, he prefers him to Horace and Boileau,
asserting that, by comparison with _them_,

"Pope _approfondit_ ce qu'ils ont _effleura_.
D'un esprit plus hardi, d'un pas plus assure,
Il porta le flambeau dans l'abeme de l'otre;
Et l'homme _avec lui seul_ apprit a se connoetre.
L'art quelquefois frivole, et quelquefois divine,
L'art des vers est dans Pope utile au genre humain."

This is not a wise account of Pope, for it does not abstract the
characteristic feature of his power; but it is a very kind one. And
of course Voltaire could not have meant any unkindness in denying
his knowledge of French. But he was certainly wrong. Pope, in
_his_ presence, would decline to speak or to read a language
of which the pronunciation was confessedly beyond him. Or, if he
did, the impression left would be still worse. In fact, no man ever
will pronounce or talk a language which he does not use, for some
part of every day, in the real intercourse of life. But that Pope
read French of an ordinary cast with fluency enough, is evident
from the extensive use which he made of Madame Dacier's labors on
the Iliad, and still more of La Valterie's prose translation of the
Iliad. Already in the year 1718, and long before his personal
knowledge of Voltaire, Pope had shown his accurate acquaintance
with some voluminous French authors, in a way which, we suspect,
was equally surprising and offensive to his noble correspondent.
The Duke of Buckingham [Endnote: 5] had addressed to Pope a
letter, containing some account of the controversy about Homer,
which had then been recently carried on in France between La Motte
and Madame Dacier. This account was delivered with an air of
teaching, which was very little in harmony with its excessive
shallowness. Pope, who sustained the part of pupil in this
interlude, replied in a manner that exhibited a knowledge of the
parties concerned in the controversy much superior to that of the
duke. In particular, he characterized the excellent notes upon
Horace of M. Dacier, the husband, in very just terms, as
distinguished from those of his conceited and half-learned wife;
and the whole reply of Pope seems very much as though he had been
playing off a mystification on his grace. Undoubtedly the pompous
duke felt that he had caught a Tartar. Now M. Dacier's Horace,
which, with the text, fills nine volumes, Pope could not have read
_except_ in French; for they are not even yet translated into
English. Besides, Pope read critically the French translations of
his own Essay on Man, Essay on Criticism, Rape of the Lock, &c. He
spoke of them as a critic; and it was at no time a fault of Pope's
to make false pretensions. All readers of Pope's Satires must also
recollect numerous proofs, that he had read Boileau with so much
feeling of his peculiar merit, that he has appropriated and
naturalized in English some of his best passages. Voltaire was,
therefore, certainly wrong.

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