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parliamentary struggle engendered a violence of language which lost in refinement what it gained in energy. The character of the great ministerial leader, Sir Robert Walpole, resolute, clear-sighted, and with a thorough knowledge of the world, but coarse, vulgar, and without tincture of letters or culture, is typical of the men by whom he was supported and opposed. Learning was at the lowest ebb. Art existed as portrait-painting or caricature. Literature was a mere arena of partisan warfare. Poetry had degenerated into rhymed pamphlets. The public, barbarised by the gladiatorial spectacle of politics, could relish nothing but blows, and blows were then most applauded when they drew blood. It was impossible that Pope, who desired popularity, should escape the infection. He accordingly wrote Satires; or, if he wrote Epistles or Essays, they were satires only not in name. And in his satire there was no occasion for him to respect the feelings of his enemies, for no one else thought of doing so. The only justification of Pope's outrageous personalities is, that such was the habitual dialect of the contemporary press. And the press only followed the lead of general conversation. In 1720 it was one of the good effects of the South Sea mania that it diverted the talk of the town from the fury of politics. Digby writes (D. to Pope, 9 July, 1720), 'The London language and conversation is, I find, quite changed since I left it only three months ago. I hope this will calm all party rage, and introduce more humanity than has of late prevailed in conversation.' It was sufficient to belong to the Court party to earn a stinging couplet from Pope's pen. His praise was equally blind, for it is bestowed on all Tories, or the Country party as they began to call themselves, without distinction. The Satires were so far of external origin. They were not prompted by the 'satiric heart,' but by the prevailing fashion of the Walpolian era, the fashion of unrestrained invective. Pope was conscious of a talent for caustic effects, conscious that he could do better than any one what every one else was doing— sting with epigram.

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2. A second and concurrent cause of Pope's satirical poetry

is to be found in the personal temperament and situation of the poet. On this point conflicting opinions have been advanced by critics and editors. While some consider Pope as a malignant libeller, others have treated his satirical language as a mere current form of literature, one of his many affectations. Either of these views appears to be too general and absolute.

It must be allowed that Pope is not animated by the genuine passion of the social reformer, the burning indignation against wrong and baseness of which Juvenal is often taken as the type. 'Pope was contented enough (De Quincey, Works, vol. ix. p. 21) with society as he found it; bad it might be, but it was good enough for him. It was the merest self-delusion if, at any moment, the instinct of glorying in his satiric mission persuaded him that in his case it might be said, "facit indignatio versum." Pope having no internal principle of wrath boiling in his breast, being really in the most pacific and charitable frame of mind towards all scoundrels whatsoever, was a hypocrite when he conceited himself to be in a dreadful passion with offenders as a body.' Nor was he the cynic or misanthrope soured, like Swift, by disappointment, or goaded, like Churchill, by hard labour. Pope had not a bad heart. His filial piety and steadiness in his friendships are publicly attested, and his many private charities are equally well ascertained. But what Lord Chesterfield said of him (Characters) was equally true, 'he was the most irritable of the genus irritabile. You could never tell what would affront him, and he brooded over particular affronts, scheming revenge in verse. In such cases he was capable of the malice which thirsts for leaving wounds. All those bitter couplets were not impulse or fashion, but meditated stabs of personal vengeance. Besides, though Pope had been well used by the world, and in return liked the world well enough, we must remember that in the period to which the Satires and Epistles belong, he was peculiarly situated with regard to society. His world had been gradually narrowed by death and desertion. Pope had identified himself with the Tory party. During the plenitude of Sir Robert Walpole's power, which almost exactly

corresponds with the composition of these Satires (1732-1738), the Tory party had dwindled into comparative insignificance both in numbers and in consideration. Pope, too, was in personal relations, not with the whole Parliamentary opposition, but a small, and that the least popular, section of it. In 1727 Swift retired in disgust to his Irish exile, and returned no more. Bolingbroke, whom Pope looked up to as to a superior being, was not acceptable to his own party, and greatly to their relief withdrew in 1735 to his retirement in Touraine. The tone of the friends had become that of a party whose game was up. Pope'despairs of his country,' and in his letters to Lord Marchmont, a young recruit whom the dazzling accomplishments of Bolingbroke had attracted, he writes as if virtue had departed from the earth, or was confined to the circle of friends-to Bolingbroke, Marchmont, Lyttelton and himself. (See Marchmont Papers, 2. 219.) In such a position the best judgment becomes clouded, and men readily get to think honour and merit a monopoly of their set. The tone of the Satires and Epistles breathes some of the bitterness of a coterie, who glorify themselves and asperse mankind. Wherever in these pieces Pope

is more genial, it is in recurrence to a former time, the period of his early prime, his first acquaintance with the 'wits' and the 'great,' with Swift, Harley, and St. John. Though only approaching fifty ('Why will you break the sabbath of my days?' Sat. and Ep. 3. 3) Pope was prematurely old, and had not moved forward with his age. The enumeration of his friends (Sat. and Ep. Prol. 135) is in the past tense, and is an enumeration of the friends of his youth. The times when he could say, 'I condescend sometimes to call a minister my friend,' were long behind him. Only the bitterness is applicable to his contemporaries. And for all outside his own circle he has nothing but bitterness. Some, indeed, were involved who were no longer living, as Addison and Halifax; but these pieces had been prepared long before. Pope was in no mood now to forgive the dead.

This union of tender reference to a more brilliant past, with bitter jealousy against the successful in the present, is the leading

contrast which gives life to Pope's satire. In both, in the cherished memories as in the numerous resentments, he was equally sincere. This gives a reality to his words which satire has often wanted when directed against social follies in general, or abstract vices. In Juvenal's lines on Hannibal or Alexander we are always conscious of the absence of true passion. The indignation is theatrical. It is not so in Pope. There may be occasional passages of mere vague tirade for the sake of sustaining the character of moral censor. But in his satirical touches he is in earnest, and in his most severe couplets most so. Even what seem random generalities are often expressions of his real feeling. This reality cannot be felt by readers who are only slightly acquainted with the poet's history, and who are not aware how thoroughly Pope was penetrated by party passion. He truly believes that the Whigs are ruining the country, that the Court is a nest of sycophants, that the majority in the House of Peers is corrupt, and the City is made up of 'thieves, supercargos, sharpers, and directors.' The same closely-drawn ties which obscured his judgment and confined his sympathies to a clique, save him from one of the defects to which satire is liable, viz. an universal indignation and undirected invective.

́One requisite of satire, that it should be an expression of genuine feeling, and not an assumed indignation, is then found in Pope's satire. Into what a different region this raises his satire, may be seen by a comparison with the satires of his contemporary Young, or of his predecessors Hall and Donne. But it is not enough that the anger should be real, it is further requisite that it should be directed upon proper objects. Pope's expressions of hate and dislike were sincere, but were they just? The answer has been implied in what has been already said. Pope's judgments, whether he is speaking of historical characters or of his contemporaries, are most perverse. His allusions to historical personages in the Satires and Epistles are few, but enough to shew that he was ignorant of the existence of a tribunal of history, or of that universal jurisprudence which governs its awards. When he comes to speak of his contemporaries he has

no test of merit but the pass-word of his coterie. He professes to lay down as his rule, 'A lash like mine no honest man shall dread.' But then the term 'honest man' is convertible with his own circle of friends. At every one else, from 'vice too high’ down to 'Budgel in the Mint,' he aims a shot.

It is essential to forming right judgments of others that we should first know ourselves. He who lives in a state of illusion as to his own character and powers will be sure to underrate those of others. His error in judging himself having its root in vanity, his estimate of others will be governed by the interest his vanity may have in exalting or in humbling them. Pope was the victim of a vanity which was not so much personal as the common stock of his set.

But though Pope's satire is vitiated by personal grudge and party spirit, there is a kind of truth which cannot be denied to it. It is unjust, but not altogether untrue. Though all who do not belong to the party are his foes, yet he is 'too discreet to run a-muck and tilt at all he meets.' His fire is not that of artillery which plays on the battalion, but that of the rifle, which picks off its men. It is the condition of human nature that every character, however worthy, has its failings. Pope, with a feeble comprehension of human life as a whole, had a keen eye for these weak places. Here he could be true. This is what makes him so formidable as a satirist. He can pick out all the flaws, all the stains, combine them effectively, and present them as a picture of the man. To his portraits none can deny a certain likeness. They appeal to that weakness in human nature to which La Rochefoucauld's maxim points, that the misfortunes even of our friends are not wholly without something that gratifies us. 'Satire will be heard,' says Gray (Letters to Walpole), 'for all the audience are by nature her friends.' Personal malice or party prejudice may have in the first place prompted Pope's onslaught. But where he has selected his victim, he always hits in the weak place. His hate is not blind hate; it only makes him more clear-sighted. He does not accumulate vituperative epithets at random, in the hope, accord

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