From Chaucer to Tennyson
produced a swarm of poorly-paid hack-writers, penny-a-liners, who lived
from hand to mouth and did small literary jobs to order. Many of these
inhabited Grub Street, and their lampoons against Pope and others of
their more successful rivals called out Pope's _Dunciad_, or epic of the
dunces, by way of retaliation. The politics of the time were sordid, and
consisted mainly of an ignoble scramble for office. The Whigs were
fighting to maintain the Act of Succession in favor of the House of
Hanover, and the Tories were secretly intriguing with the exiled
Stuarts. Many of the leaders, such as the great Whig champion, John
Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, were without political principle or even
personal honesty. The Church, too, was in a condition of spiritual
deadness. Bishoprics and livings were sold, and given to political
favorites. Clergymen, like Swift and Lawrence Sterne, were worldly in
their lives and immoral in their writings, and were practically
unbelievers. The growing religious skepticism appeared in the Deist
controversy. Numbers of men in high position were Deists; the Earl of
Shaftesbury, for example, and Pope's brilliant friend, Henry St. John,
Lord Bolingbroke, the head of the Tory ministry, whose political
writings had much influence upon his young French acquaintance,
Voltaire. Pope was a Roman Catholic, though there was little to show it
in his writings, and the underlying thought of his famous _Essay on Man_
was furnished him by Bolingbroke. The letters of the cold-hearted
Chesterfield to his son were accepted as a manual of conduct, and La
Rochefoucauld's cynical maxims were quoted as authority on life and
human nature. Said Swift:
As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew
From nature, I believe them true.
They argue no corrupted mind
In him; the fault is in mankind.
The succession which Dryden had willed to Congreve was taken up by
Alexander Pope. He was a man quite unlike Dryden--sickly, deformed,
morbidly precocious, and spiteful; nevertheless he joined on to and
continued Dryden. He was more careful in his literary workmanship than
his great forerunner, and in his _Moral Essays_ and _Satires_ he brought
the Horatian epistle in verse, the formal satire and that species of
didactic poem of which Boileau had given the first example, to an
exquisite perfection of finish and verbal art. Dryden had translated
Vergil, and so Pope translated Homer. The throne of the dunces, which
Dryden had conferred upon Shadwell, Pope, in his _Dunciad_, passed on to
two of his own literary foes, Theobald and Colley Cibber. There is a
great waste of strength in this elaborate squib, and most of the petty
writers, whose names it has preserved, as has been said, like flies in
amber, are now quite unknown. But, although we have to read it with
notes, to get the point of its allusions, it is easy to see what
execution it must have done at the time, and it is impossible to
withhold admiration from the wit, the wickedness, the triumphant
mischief of the thing. In the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_, the satirical
sketch of Addison--who had offended Pope by praising a rival translation
of Homer--is as brilliant as any thing of the kind in Dryden. Pope's
very malignity made his sting sharper than Dryden's. He secreted venom,
and worked out his revenges deliberately, bringing all the resources of
his art to bear upon the question of how to give the most pain most
cleverly.
Pope's masterpiece is, perhaps, the _Rape of the Lock_, a mock heroic
poem, a "dwarf _Iliad_" recounting, in five cantos, a society quarrel,
which arose from Lord Petre's cutting a lock of hair from the head of
Mrs. Arabella Fermor. Boileau, in his _Lutrin_, had treated with the
same epic dignity a dispute over the placing of the reading-desk in a
parish church. Pope was the Homer of the drawing-room, the boudoir, the
tea-urn, the ombre-party, the sedan-chair, the parrot cage, and the
lap-dogs. This poem, in its sparkle and airy grace, is the topmost
blossom of a highly artificial society, the quintessence of whatever
poetry was possible in those
Tea-cup times of hood and hoop,
And when the patch was worn,
with whose decorative features, at least, the recent Queen Anne revival
has made this generation familiar. It may be said of it, as Thackery
said of Gay's pastorals: "It is to poetry what charming little Dresden
china figures are to sculpture, graceful, minikin, fantastic, with a
certain beauty always accompanying them." The _Rape of the Lock_,
perhaps, stops short of beauty, but it attains elegance and prettiness
in a supreme degree. In imitation of the gods and goddesses in the
_Iliad_, who intermeddle for or against the human characters, Pope
introduced the Sylphs of the Rosicrucian philosophy. We may measure the
distance between imagination and fancy, if we will compare these little
filagree creatures with Shakspere's elves, whose occupation it was
To tread the ooze of the salt deep,
Or run upon the sharp wind of the north,...
Or on the beached margent of the sea
To dance their ringlets to the whispering wind.
Very different are the offices of Pope's fays:
Our humble province is to tend the fair;
Not a less pleasing, though less glorious, care;
To save the powder from too rude a gale,
Nor let the imprisoned essences exhale....
Nay oft in dreams invention we bestow
To change a flounce or add a furbelow.
Pope was not a great poet; it has been doubted whether he was a poet at
all. He does not touch the heart, or stimulate the imagination, as the
true poet always does. In the poetry of nature, and the poetry of
passion, he was altogether impotent. His _Windsor Forest_ and his
_Pastorals_ are artificial and false, not written with "the eye upon the
object." His epistle of _Eloisa to Abelard_ is declamatory and academic,
and leaves the reader cold. The only one of his poems which is at all
possessed with feeling is his pathetic _Elegy to the Memory of an
Unfortunate Lady_. But he was a great literary artist. Within the
cramped and starched regularity of the heroic couplet, which the fashion
of the time and his own habit of mind imposed upon him, he secured the
largest variety of modulation and emphasis of which that verse was
capable. He used antithesis, periphrasis, and climax with great skill.
His example dominated English poetry for nearly a century, and even now,
when a poet like Dr. Holmes, for example, would write satire or humorous
verse of a dignified kind, he turns instinctively to the measure and
manner of Pope. He was not a consecutive thinker, like Dryden, and cared
less about the truth of his thought than about the pointedness of its
expression. His language was closer-grained than Dryden's. His great art
was the art of putting things. He is more quoted than any other English
poet but Shakspere. He struck the average intelligence, the common sense
of English readers, and furnished it with neat, portable formulas, so
that it no longer needed to "vent its observation in mangled terms," but
could pour itself out compactly, artistically in little ready-made
molds. But this high-wrought brilliancy, this unceasing point, soon
fatigue. His poems read like a series of epigrams; and every line has a
hit or an effect.
From the reign of Queen Anne date the beginnings of the periodical
essay. Newspapers had been published since the time of the civil war; at
first irregularly, and then regularly. But no literature of permanent
value appeared in periodical form until Richard Steele started the
_Tatler_, in 1709. In this he was soon joined by his friend, Joseph
Addison; and in its successor, the _Spectator_, the first number of
which was issued March 1, 1711, Addison's contributions outnumbered
Steele's. The _Tatler_ was published on three, the _Spectator_ on six,
days of the week. The _Tatler_ gave political news, but each number of
the _Spectator_ consisted of a single essay. The object of these
periodicals was to reflect the passing humors of the time, and to
satirize the follies and minor immoralities of the town. "I shall
endeavor," wrote Addison, in the tenth paper of the _Spectator_, "to
enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality....It was
said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy down from Heaven to inhabit
among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have
brought Philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges,
to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses."
Addison's satire was never personal. He was a moderate man, and did what
he could to restrain Steele's intemperate party zeal. His character was
dignified and pure, and his strongest emotion seems to have been his
religious feeling. One of his contemporaries called him "a parson in a
tie wig," and he wrote several excellent hymns. His mission was that of
censor of the public taste. Sometimes he lectured and sometimes he
preached, and in his Saturday papers he brought his wide reading and
nice scholarship into service for the instruction of his readers. Such
was the series of essays in which he gave an elaborate review of
_Paradise Lost_. Such also was his famous paper, the _Vision of Mirza_,
an oriental allegory of human life. The adoption of this slightly
pedagogic tone was justified by the prevalent ignorance and frivolity of
the age. But the lighter portions of the _Spectator_ are those which
have worn the best. Their style is at once correct and easy, and it is
as a humorist, a sly observer of manners, and, above all, a delightful
talker, that Addison is best known to posterity. In the personal
sketches of the members of the Spectator Club, of Will Honeycomb,
Captain Sentry, Sir Andrew Freeport, and, above all, Sir Roger de
Coverley, the quaint and honest country gentleman, may be found the
nucleus of the modern prose fiction of character. Addison's humor is
always a trifle grave. There is no whimsy, no frolic in it, as in Sterne
or Lamb. "He thinks justly," said Dr. Johnson, "but he thinks faintly."
The _Spectator_ had a host of followers, from the somewhat heavy
_Rambler_ and _Idler_ of Johnson, down to the _Salmagundi_ papers of our
own Irving, who was, perhaps, Addison's latest and best literary
descendant. In his own age Addison made some figure as a poet and
dramatist. His _Campaign_, celebrating the victory of Blenheim, had one
much admired couplet, in which Marlborough was likened to the angel of
tempest, who,
Pleased the Almighty's orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.
His stately, classical tragedy, _Cato_, which was acted at Drury Lane
Theater in 1712, with immense applause, was pronounced by Dr. Johnson
"unquestionably the noblest production of Addison's genius." Is is,
notwithstanding, cold and tedious, as a whole, though it has some fine
declamatory passages--in particular the soliloquy of Cato in the fifth
act--
It must be so: Plato, thou reasonest well, etc.
The greatest of the Queen Anne wits, and one of the most savage and
powerful satirists that ever lived, was Jonathan Swift. As secretary in
the family of Sir William Temple, and domestic chaplain to the Earl of
Berkeley, he had known in youth the bitterness of poverty and
dependence. Afterward he wrote himself into influence with the Tory
ministry, and was promised a bishopric, but was put off with the deanery
of St. Patrick's, and retired to Ireland to "die like a poisoned rat in
a hole." His life was made tragical by the forecast of the madness which
finally overtook him, "The stage dark-ended," said Scott, "ere the
curtain fell." Insanity deepened into idiocy and a hideous silence, and
for three years before his death he spoke hardly ever a word. He had