Imágenes de página
PDF
ePub

sions, is the world in which Pope lived and moved, and which he has drawn in a few vivid lines, with the keenness and intensity of which there is nothing in our literature that can compare. Clarendon's portraits in his gallery of characters are more complete and discriminating, and infinitely more candid. But they do not flash the personage, or the situation, upon the imagination, and fix it in the memory, as one of Pope's incisive lines does. Like all the greatest poets, Pope is individual and local. He can paint with his full power only what he sees. When he attempts abstract truth, general themes, past history, his want of knowledge makes itself felt in feeble and distorted views. 4

The first production of Pope to appear in print was his Pastorals, published 1709, when the author was twenty-one, but written some years earlier. As the work of a youth of seventeen they are a marvellous feat of melodious versification. In any other respect they are only worthy of mention as already exemplifying the false taste which Pope never got rid of when he attempted any other theme than manners.

Of this false taste his Messiah is an elaborate specimen. This poem is an adaptation of Virgil's fourth Eclogue, Pollio, to Christ, grafting upon the lines of the Latin poet the images supplied by the prophecies of Isaiah. The ingenuity with which the double imitation is carried through is only surpassed by the mastery shown over the melody of the couplet, and the exhibition of a complete poetical vocabulary. These brilliant qualities carried by storm the admiration of Pope's contemporaries, and continued to command the homage of the eighteenth century down to Johnson. Language experience, enforced by the precept and example of Wordsworth, makes our age too keenly feel that the pathos and sublimity of the Hebrew prophet are destroyed by the artificial embroidery with which Pope has overlaid them. Pope's Messiah reads to us like a sickly paraphrase, in which all the majesty of the original is dissipated. 'Righteousness' becomes 'dewy nectar'; 'sheep' are the 'fleecy care'; the call to Jerusalem to 'arise and shine' is turned into an invocation to 'exalt her tow'ry head.' The 'fir-tree and box-tree' of Isaiah are 'the spiry fir and shapely box.' In his translation of the prediction 'the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice den,' Pope makes the cockatrice a 'crested basilisk,' and the asp ‘a speckled snake'; they have both scales of a 'green lustre,' and a 'forky tongue,' and with this last the 'smiling infant shall inno

cently play.' 'The leopard,' says Isaiah, 'shall lie down with the kid, and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them'; Pope could not leave this exquisite picture undecorated, and with him 'boys in flowery bands the tiger lead.' The alternative is an example of the justice of De Quincey's observation that 'the Arcadia of Pope's age was the spurious Arcadia of the opera theatre.' (Elwin.)

The Essay on Criticism appeared in 1711. This is a didactic poem of which the remote prototype is Horace's Ars poetica, and the immediate, Boileau's Art poétique. It differs from these models in its subject, which is the Art of Criticism. To Dr. Johnson this production appeared 'to display such extent of comprehension, such nicety of distinction, such acquaintance with mankind, and such knowledge both of ancient and modern learning, as are not often attained by the matured age and the longest experience.' This verdict of Johnson may be cited to show the great advance which criticism has made in England in the course of a century. We should now say that the precepts of Pope's Essay are conventional truisms, the ordinary rules of composition which may be found in all school manuals, and which are taught to boys as part of their prosody. 'The Essay,' says De Quincey, 'is a mere versification, like a metrical multiplication table, of commonplaces the most mouldy with which criticism has baited its rat-traps.' It required very little reading of the French textbooks to find the maxims which Pope has here strung together. But he has dressed them so neatly, and turned them out with such sparkle and point, that these truisms have acquired a weight not their own, and they circulate as proverbs among us in virtue of their pithy form rather than their truth. They exemplify his own line 'What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.' Pope told Spence that he had 'gone through all the best critics,' specifying Quintilian, Rapin and Le Bossu. But whatever trouble he took in collecting what to say, his main effort is expended upon how to say it. The Essay on Criticism abounds in those striking couplets which have lodged in all our memories, and given their last and abiding shape to dicta which have been extant in substance since literature began. A good example of this art is supplied by the couplet which has just been quoted from;

[ocr errors]

True wit is nature to advantage dressed;

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.'

which is Pope's compressed form of the following prose of Boileau ; 'Qu'est-ce qu'une pensée neuve, brillante, extraordinaire? Ce n'est point comme se le persuadent les ignorants, une pensée que personne n'a jamais eue, ni dû avoir. C'est au contraire une pensée qui a dû venir à tout le monde, et que quelqu'un s'avise le premier d'exprimer. Un bon mot n'est bon mot qu'en ce qu'il dit une chose que chacun pensoit, et qu'il la dit d'une manière vive, fine, et nouvelle.'

But though the Essay abounds with sparkle and point and memorable lines, it is very far from being composed throughout of nothing but such. Besides the general fault, which pervades all Pope's longer efforts, of want of coherent texture and consecutiveness of argument, the Essay on Criticism offers too many weak lines, obscure expressions, and monotonous rhymes. Negligences of versification, such as no piece of Pope's composition is entirely free from, abound in the Essay. One instance of this slovenliness is the want of variety in his endings. There are twelve couplets rhyming to wit, and ten rhyming to sense.

Unhappy wit, like most mistaken things,

Atones not for that envy which it brings.'

'Mistaken things' here means 'things wrongly taken by others,' which is not the natural sense of the words; and 'atones' stands for 'compensates.'

'But sense survived when merry jests were passed.'

It requires explanation that 'were passed' here means 'had passed away.'

'Critics

Form short ideas, and offend in arts

As most in manners, from a love to parts.'

In this one couplet are three expressions, 'short ideas,' 'offend in arts,' and 'love to parts,' the meaning of which has to be guessed, or gathered from the context; it is not apparent on the face of the words used. In some styles of poetry enigmatical expression is not a fault; in an Aeschylean chorus it is of the essence of the charm that the revelations should be shrouded in clouds. But Pope's verse, like French prose, is constructed on the principle of being immediately intelligible; the moment it is not so, its raison d'être is gone.

The Rape of the Lock is a mock-heroic poem, the style of which was suggested to Pope by Boileau's Lutrin. Pope followed his model in entitling his work 'An heroicomical poem,' the epithet employed by Boileau in the 1709 edition of his Lutrin. It was founded upon an incident which had caused great commotion in the circle of Catholic families in which Pope, though not himself a member of it, had friends. Lord Petre, in a moment of youthful frolic, had cut off a lock of hair from Miss Arabella Fermor's head, a liberty which was keenly resented, and had caused a violent quarrel between the families. Mr. Caryll, a Sussex squire, nephew to the Mr. John Caryll who had been Secretary to Mary, James II's Queen, suggested to Pope to write a poem, which by treating the incident playfully, might induce the offended family to take a more lenient view of what they regarded as an outrage. This was the motive of the first draft of the poem, as it was printed in Tonson's Miscellany, 1712, in two cantos, and no more than 330 lines. This first sketch was written off in a fortnight, but its author, pleased with the success of his work, elaborated it afterwards, and enlarged it especially by the introduction of what he calls the 'machinery,' or the agency of supernatural beings of the fairy species, whom he calls 'sylphs.' It is universally admitted that the later additions, and this invention especially, are great improvements, thus forming an exception to the rule that a poet should never recast, or supplement, a piece which he has turned out well in the first instance.

The heroine of the poem, Belinda, is Miss Fermor; the Baron is Lord Petre; Thalestris is Mrs. Morley; Sir Plume is Mrs. Morley's brother, Sir George Brown of Keddington. Pope obtained permission to dedicate the poem to Miss Fermor; but notwithstanding that he takes care to tell her that 'Belinda resembles her in nothing but in beauty,' the lady was more offended than flattered by the representation given of her. Sir George Brown was indignant at being made to talk nothing but nonsense. In bringing about its professed aim, the reconciliation of the two families, the poem was entirely unsuccessful.

But with the public it was otherwise. On its first publication Addison pronounced it a delicious little thing; 'merum sal.' Criticism the most hostile to Pope, of which there has been abundance in the modern reaction against his influence, has agreed to spare the Rape. Macaulay pronounces it his best poem. De Quincey, who never spares Pope when he is weak, goes beyond

Macaulay, and declares it 'the most exquisite monument of playful fancy that universal literature offers.' The Rape of the Lock, writes Hazlitt, 'is the most exquisite specimen of filigree work ever invented. It is made of gauze and silver spangles. The most glittering appearance is given to everything; to paste, pomatum, billets-doux, and patches. Airs, languid airs breathe around; the atmosphere is perfumed with affectation. A toilet is described with the solemnity of an altar raised to the goddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction to set off the meanest things. . . . It is the triumph of insignificance, the apotheosis of foppery and folly. It is the perfection of the mock-heroic.' - And Professor Conington thinks 'there can be little to say about a poem so exquisite in its peculiar style of art as to make the task of searching for faults almost hopeless, that of commending beauties simply impertinent.'

Such warmth of encomium as this is at least testimony to the admiration which the skill of the poet can still excite in the reader. But it is criticism which touches the workmanship rather than the work. Pope's execution is so clever as always to charm us even when his subject is most devoid of interest. The secret of the peculiar fascination of The Rape of the Lock lies, I believe, not merely in the art and management, but in the fact that here, for the first time, Pope is writing of that which he knew, of the life he saw and the people he lived with. For Windsor Forest, though he lived in it, he had no eyes; but a drawing-room, a fop, and a belle, these were the objects which had struck his young fancy when he emerged from the linendraper's villa, and he had studied them. About these things he can be real and truthful; when he writes of Abelard and Heloise he is making believe, he is an actor trying to think himself into his part. Only in his Satires and Epistles and in the characters of his Moral Essays will he again succeed in hitting upon congenial matter on which to lay out his extraordinary power of versification.

Nor is the reflection of social life and manners which the Rape offers confined to superficial forms only. The most intimate sentiments of the time find their representation here. As an instance we may point to the mean estimation of women. Contempt veiled under the show of deference, a mockery of chivalry, its form without its spirit,-this is the attitude assumed towards women by the poet in this piece. 'The world of fashion is displayed

« AnteriorContinuar »