English Literature
poetry, manufactured a little garden more artificial than his verses, and
cultivated his friendship with Martha Blount, with whom for many years he
spent a good part of each day, and who remained faithful to him to the end
of his life. At Twickenham he wrote his _Moral Epistles_ (poetical satires
modeled after Horace) and revenged himself upon all his critics in the
bitter abuse of the _Dunciad_. He died in 1744 and was buried at
Twickenham, his religion preventing him from the honor, which was certainly
his due, of a resting place in Westminster Abbey.
WORKS OF POPE. For convenience we may separate Pope's work into three
groups, corresponding to the early, middle, and later period of his life.
In the first he wrote his "Pastorals," "Windsor Forest," "Messiah," "Essay
on Criticism," "Eloise to Abelard," and the _Rape of the Lock;_ in the
second, his translations of Homer; in the third the _Dunciad_ and the
_Epistles_, the latter containing the famous "Essay on Man" and the
"Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," which is in truth his "Apologia," and in which
alone we see Pope's life from his own view point.
The "Essay on Criticism" sums up the art of poetry as taught first by
Horace, then by Boileau and the eighteenth-century classicists. Though
written in heroic couplets, we hardly consider this as a poem but rather as
a storehouse of critical maxims. "For fools rush in where angels fear to
tread"; "To err is human, to forgive divine"; "A little learning is a
dangerous thing,"--these lines, and many more like them from the same
source, have found their way into our common speech, and are used, without
thinking of the author, whenever we need an apt quotation.
The _Rape of the Lock_ is a masterpiece of its kind, and comes nearer to
being a "creation" than anything else that Pope has written. The occasion
of the famous poem was trivial enough. A fop at the court of Queen Anne,
one Lord Petre, snipped a lock of hair from the abundant curls of a pretty
maid of honor named Arabella Fermor. The young lady resented it, and the
two families were plunged into a quarrel which was the talk of London.
Pope, being appealed to, seized the occasion to construct, not a ballad, as
the Cavaliers would have done, nor an epigram, as French poets love to do,
but a long poem in which all the mannerisms of society are pictured in
minutest detail and satirized with the most delicate wit. The first
edition, consisting of two cantos, was published in 1712; and it is amazing
now to read of the trivial character of London court life at the time when
English soldiers were battling for a great continent in the French and
Indian wars. Its instant success caused Pope to lengthen the poem by three
more cantos; and in order to make a more perfect burlesque of an epic poem,
he introduces gnomes, sprites, sylphs, and salamanders,[188] instead of the
gods of the great epics, with which his readers were familiar. The poem is
modeled after two foreign satires: Boileau's _Le Lutrin_ (reading desk), a
satire on the French clergy, who raised a huge quarrel over the location of
a lectern; and _La Secchia Rapita_ (stolen bucket), a famous Italian satire
on the petty causes of the endless Italian wars. Pope, however, went far
ahead of his masters in style and in delicacy of handling a mock-heroic
theme, and during his lifetime the _Rape of the Lock_ was considered as the
greatest poem of its kind in all literature. The poem is still well worth
reading; for as an expression of the artificial life of the age--of its
cards, parties, toilettes, lapdogs, tea-drinking, snuff-taking, and idle
vanities--it is as perfect in its way as _Tamburlaine_, which reflects the
boundless ambition of the Elizabethans.
The fame of Pope's _Iliad_, which was financially the most successful of
his books, was due to the fact that he interpreted Homer in the elegant,
artificial language of his own age. Not only do his words follow literary
fashions but even the Homeric characters lose their strength and become
fashionable men of the court. So the criticism of the scholar Bentley was
most appropriate when he said, "It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must
not call it Homer." Pope translated the entire _Iliad_ and half of the
_Odyssey_; and the latter work was finished by two Cambridge scholars,
Elijah Fenton and William Broome, who imitated the mechanical couplets so
perfectly that it is difficult to distinguish their work from that of the
greatest poet of the age. A single selection is given to show how, in the
nobler passages, even Pope may faintly suggest the elemental grandeur of
Homer:
The troops exulting sat in order round,
And beaming fires illumined all the ground.
As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,
O'er Heaven's clear azure spreads her sacred light,
When not a breath disturbs the deep serene,
And not a cloud o'ercasts the solemn scene;
Around her throne the vivid planets roll,
And stars unnumbered gild the glowing pole,
O'er the dark trees a yellower verdure shed,
And tip with silver every mountain's head.
The "Essay" is the best known and the most quoted of all Pope's works.
Except in form it is not poetry, and when one considers it as an essay and
reduces it to plain prose, it is found to consist of numerous literary
ornaments without any very solid structure of thought to rest upon. The
purpose of the essay is, in Pope's words, to "vindicate the ways of God to
Man"; and as there are no unanswered problems in Pope's philosophy, the
vindication is perfectly accomplished in four poetical epistles, concerning
man's relations to the universe, to himself, to society, and to happiness.
The final result is summed up in a few well-known lines:
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.
Like the "Essay on Criticism," the poem abounds in quotable lines, such as
the following, which make the entire work well worth reading:
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest.
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
The same ambition can destroy or save,
And makes a patriot as it makes a knave.
Honor and shame from no condition rise;
Act well your part, there all the honor lies.
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw:
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite:
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage,
And beads and prayer books are the toys of age:
Pleased with this bauble still, as that before;
Till tired he sleeps, and Life's poor play is o'er.[189]
_The Dunciad_ (i.e. the "Iliad of the Dunces") began originally as a
controversy concerning Shakespeare, but turned out to be a coarse and
revengeful satire upon all the literary men of the age who had aroused
Pope's anger by their criticism or lack of appreciation of his genius.
Though brilliantly written and immensely popular at one time, its present
effect on the reader is to arouse a sense of pity that a man of such
acknowledged power and position should abuse both by devoting his talents
to personal spite and petty quarrels. Among the rest of his numerous works
the reader will find Pope's estimate of himself best set forth in his
"Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," and it will be well to close our study of this
strange mixture of vanity and greatness with "The Universal Prayer," which
shows at least that Pope had considered, and judged himself, and that all
further judgment is consequently superfluous.
JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745)
In each of Marlowe's tragedies we have the picture of a man dominated by a
single passion, the lust of power for its own sake. In each we see that a
powerful man without self-control is like a dangerous instrument in the
hands of a child; and the tragedy ends in the destruction of the man by the
ungoverned power which he possesses. The life of Swift is just such a
living tragedy. He had the power of gaining wealth, like the hero of the
_Jew of Malta_; yet he used it scornfully, and in sad irony left what
remained to him of a large property to found a hospital for lunatics. By
hard work he won enormous literary power, and used it to satirize our
common humanity. He wrested political power from the hands of the Tories,
and used it to insult the very men who had helped him, and who held his
fate in their hands. By his dominant personality he exercised a curious
power over women, and used it brutally to make them feel their inferiority.
Being loved supremely by two good women, he brought sorrow and death to
both, and endless misery to himself. So his power brought always tragedy in
its wake. It is only when we remember his life of struggle and
disappointment and bitterness that we can appreciate the personal quality
in his satire, and perhaps find some sympathy for this greatest genius of
all the Augustan writers.
LIFE. Swift was born in Dublin, of English parents, in 1667. His father
died before he was born; his mother was poor, and Swift, though proud as
Lucifer, was compelled to accept aid from relatives, who gave it
grudgingly. At the Kilkenny school, and especially at Dublin University, he
detested the curriculum, reading only what appealed to his own nature; but,
since a degree was necessary to his success, he was compelled to accept it
as a favor from the examiners, whom he despised in his heart. After
graduation the only position open to him was with a distant relative, Sir
William Temple, who gave him the position of private secretary largely on
account of the unwelcome relationship.
Temple was a statesman and an excellent diplomatist; but he thought himself
to be a great writer as well, and he entered into a literary controversy
concerning the relative merits of the classics and modern literature.
Swift's first notable work, _The Battle of the Books_, written at this time
but not published, is a keen satire upon both parties in the controversy.
The first touch of bitterness shows itself here; for Swift was in a galling
position for a man of his pride, knowing his intellectual superiority to
the man who employed him, and yet being looked upon as a servant and eating
at the servants' table. Thus he spent ten of the best years of his life in
the pretty Moor Park, Surrey, growing more bitter each year and steadily
cursing his fate. Nevertheless he read and studied widely, and, after his
position with Temple grew unbearable, quarreled with his patron, took
orders, and entered the Church of England. Some years later we find him
settled in the little church of Laracor, Ireland,--a country which he
disliked intensely, but whither he went because no other "living" was open
to him.
In Ireland, faithful to his church duties, Swift labored to better the
condition of the unhappy people around him. Never before had the poor of
his parishes been so well cared for; but Swift chafed under his yoke,
growing more and more irritated as he saw small men advanced to large
positions, while he remained unnoticed in a little country church,--largely
because he was too proud and too blunt with those who might have advanced
him. While at Laracor he finished his _Tale of a Tub_, a satire on the
various churches of the day, which was published in London with the _Battle