great enemies of the Roman Catholics; and he was influenced by the fierce animosity with which his disappointed friends, particularly Swift and Bolingbroke, regarded the favourites of the English Court. But, in the second place, the whole attitude of The Craftsman towards its opponents delighted his imagination, because it was so like his own. The claim to a monopoly of Virtue and Patriotism, the sense of superiority produced by the contemplation of the Corruption without him, was the vantage-ground from which he had himself assaulted the Dunces. Moreover, his vanity was flattered by the rhetorical liberty with which he found himself able to reflect on the weaknesses of kings and queens. At the outset he contented himself with taking the moneyed interest and the courtiers as vicious illustrations of his moral texts; and his satire has, for the most part, condensed itself in epigrammatic couplets charged with secret history, such as the one aimed at Walpole's mistress : Ask you why Phryne the whole auction buys? But after Bolingbroke's retirement to France, when Pope's villa at Twickenham became the rallying-point of the Opposition, the poet's tone became loftier. All the accusations against Walpole, the corruption of his domestic policy, the cowardice of his foreign policy, his encouragernent of Grub Street, his servility to Spain, are translated into poetical rhetoric, and with these attacks on the Minister are blended many oblique reflections on the morals and manners of still more exalted persons. The artfulness of Pope's irony reaches the highest degree of finish in his Imitation of Horace's Epistle to Augustus (1737) Oh, could I mount on the Mæonian wing Your arms, your action, your repose to sing! What seas you traversed, and what fields you fought, How barb'rous rage subsided at your word, How nations wondered while they dropped the sword! 1 Moral Essay, v. 119-120. } How, when you nodded, over land and deep Peace stole her wing, and wrapped the world in sleep : Till earth's extremes your mediation own, And Asia's tyrants trembled on their throne. But verse, alas! your Majesty disdains, And I'm not used to panegyric strains. The zeal of fools offends at any time, And when I aim at praise, they say I bite. In Seventeen Hundred and Thirty-Eight his conception. of the public mission of his satire raised him to heights of eloquence beyond anything he had yet reached. He had imagined himself in the Epistle to Arbuthnot as the martyr of Virtue; he now claimed to be her prophet :- v O sacred weapon! left for truth's defence, Sole dread of folly, vice, and indolence! To all but heaven-directed hands denied! The Muse may give thee, but the gods must guide. Reverent I touch thee, but with honest zeal, To rouse the watchmen of the public weal, To Virtue's work provoke the tardy hall, And goad the prelate slumbering in his stall. Ye tinsel insects! whom a Court maintains, That counts your beauties only by your stains; Spin all your cobwebs o'er the eye of day! The Muse's wing shall brush you all away; All his grace preaches, all his lordship sings, All that makes saints of queens and gods of kings; All, all but truth drops still-born from the press, Like the last gazette or the last address. The same brilliant satiric imagination, contemplating the wide scene of political affairs, is visible as late as 1742 in The New Dunciad, and finds sublime expression in the gigantic yawn of the goddess with which the poem closes. But hardly had this poem appeared, when unfortunately, but characteristically, a personal quarrel turned Pope's ideas into an entirely different channel, inducing him to recast the whole framework of The Dunciad, with fatal effects to its artistic form. He dethroned his first hero, and replaced him by the Poet Laureate, a man of totally different character, with the result that, as Johnson says, "he has depraved his poem by giving to Cibber the old books, the cold pedantry, and sluggish pertinacity of Theobald." The Dunciad in its final form appeared in 1743; it was the last work of the poet, who died on the 30th of May 1744. In this survey of the poetical career of Pope, the reader may perhaps be struck with the remarkable analogy it presents-in its contrast as well as in its likeness-to the contemporary change in the English Constitution and to the parallel ascendency of Walpole in politics. Till the rise of the younger Pitt, no English Minister since the Revolution could compare with Walpole in the influence he exercised over the destinies of the nation. Through the most critical period of two reigns he enjoyed the almost boundless confidence of his Sovereign. One by one his chief rivals, Stanhope, Compton, Carteret, Townshend, yielded to his superiority. The efforts of his brilliant opponents, Bolingbroke and Pulteney, were unable to shake his authority. Out of widespread ruin and distress, caused by the collapse of the South Sea Scheme, he brought the finances of the country into a state of soundness and prosperity. He was the one statesman that the circumstances of the time required. The steady aim of his government was the completion, by the firm establishment on the throne of the House of Brunswick, of the Whig fabric of Civil Liberty, begun in the Revolution of 1688. For the success of his policy the first necessity was Peace. All things, in Walpole's mind, were secondary to this master object. It was his business, in the first place, to preserve the goodwill of the towns, where the Whig element generally prevailed, by finding outlets for their commerce, but also to reconcile the minds of the country gentlemen, whose feelings he understood so well, to the change of dynasty, by lightening their burden of taxation, and by maintaining the political ascendency of the National Church. With such sagacity did he pursue his ends that, when the last Stuart rising took place, the general system of society, in spite of the superficial panic caused by the appearance of the Pretender, remained unshaken. Yet the end was not secured without grievous sacrifices and suppressions. Walpole felt no scruples about the means he employed. In his hands Parliamentary corruption was carried to an unexampled pitch of venality. The character of English gentlemen and statesmen was thereby degraded, and the whole tone of society was injured by the scorn cast on the traditions of chivalry, and on the principle of patriotism as a practical factor in political life. However necessary in the cause of domestic prosperity it might have been to preserve peace, it was humiliating to a nation which had borne a leading part in the elevated European policy of William III., to see its interests abroad treated on the tradesman-like principles professed by the government of Walpole. Like Walpole in the sphere of politics, Pope was the one predominant figure in the poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: since the appearance of The Rape of the Lock, his superiority over all rival writers in metre was unquestioned. As in the conduct of affairs it was Walpole's prime aim to make good the constitutional settlement effected by the Revolution of 1688, without any breach in the continuity of English history, so did Pope strive in poetry, out of imaginative chaos, to bring form and order into the region of taste, while still preserving the traditions of the past. And as Walpole carried out his policy on the principle, Quieta non movere, by his sagacious financial measures and his careful preservation of peace, so were all Pope's artistic efforts concentrated on developing the classic movement that had descended to him as a legacy from Dryden. In his youthful days it was his ambition to adapt the heroic couplet, by means of classical forms, to express the romantic ideas familiar to him in the poetry of earlier generations. But as he grew older, he felt more and more the pressure of the social atmosphere about him, and the change of thought in a community in which mediæval traditions were always giving way before the advance of civil ideas. Hence, during the latter part of his life, his poetry became almost exclusively ethical, and he himself makes it a matter of boasting That not in Fancy's maze he wandered long, But stooped to Truth and moralised his song. In executing this design, he gave to the couplet, as inherited from Dryden, a polish and balance which perfected its capacities of artistic expression, perhaps at the expense of its native vigour. He was doubtless right in following the bent of his genius as well as the tendencies of his age; and it is on a false principle of criticism that Warton, and those who think with him, blame his poetry on account of the absence from it of qualities which they find in other poets. Comparing the crude classicism of form in the Pastorals and The Messiah with the perfect command of colloquial idiom displayed in the Moral Essays, in the Epistle to Arbuthnot, and in the Imitations of Horace, we can hardly fail to come to the conclusion that the influence of the Classical Renaissance on Pope's style was not brought to its artistic climax till towards the close of his life. Still it is unquestionable that this process of development involved a necessary sacrifice, nor could any contemporary lover of old English poetry have seen without concern the exhaustion of springs of romantic imagination which had found nourishment in the national genius of the seventeenth century. Pope himself had no lyric gift; but the complete disappearance, during the first half of the eighteenth century, of the poetical freedom and impulse which had inspired so much English verse up to the time of Alexander's Feast, suggests that general causes were at work beyond the operation of individual genius. And the simplest explanation of the phenomenon seems to me to be that the circumstances which had brought about the Revolution of 1688 had, for the time being, caused the temporary suppression of certain mediæval elements in the national life, which did not rise again into vigour till they found renewed poetical expression in the lyrics of Gray and Collins. |