JONATHAN SWIFT, JOHN GAY, ALEXANDER POPE
If writers are friends in the eighteenth century, it is best that they plow different furrows or live in different cities. A prose writer and a poet might be friends, but men active on the same patch might fall out over a patron, a reward, an error of emphasis. Yet some of the great writers of the early eighteenth century knew and applauded one another. Gulliver’s Travels, The Threepenny Opera and The Dunciad are cousin works by men who had one another’s interests—to some extent—at heart.
Jonathan Swift’s mother was a Leicestershire Herrick, of Robert Herrick’s family—so it happens that the savage satirist and the gentle Cavalier grow on a single family tree. They also share, in different centuries, a religious vocation and a politics. Yet their poetic imaginations belong on opposite sides of the divide that was the Commonwealth and Restoration. Swift is a brilliant savage who understands—though he cannot control—the political and literary jungle in which he lives.
If on Parnassus’ top you sit,
You rarely bite, are always bit:
Each poet of inferior size
On you shall rail and criticise...
His reputation as a poet stands higher in this century than ever before. Several modern poets identify original virtues in his verse, long regarded as peripheral to his major prose work. Robert Graves considers the verses “trifles,” “but these trifles, though darkened by a morbid horror of man’s physical circumstances, demonstrate the proper use of English: they are clear, simple, inventive, pungent, unaffected, original, generous, utterly outspoken.”
Born in Dublin in 1667, Swift insisted on his Englishness. He was of Yorkshire stock. His father died before Swift was born. His education was paid for by an uncle, first in Kilkenny and later at Trinity College, Dublin, where he did not distinguish himself. He traveled to England and became secretary to Sir William Temple at Moor Park in Surrey. There, among other studies, he labored at verse, subjected his work to endless revisions, and fell under the influence not of Milton, whose religion and politics were anathema to him, but of Abraham Cowley, whose Pindaric odes appealed (disastrously) to many young poets. Swift’s odes are negligible. His first significant poem, “Mrs Harris’s Petition,” was not composed until he was thirty-four (1701), by which time he had put Cowley aside and opened his ears to the spoken language of the day, the new eighteenth century. The “Petition” is thoroughly colloquial, in irregular long-lined couplets that assume the tone of a woman speaking at great speed. Undecorated, it displays what De Quincey called Swift’s “vernacularity.”
When he composed the “Petition” he had left Temple, abandoning his very promising secular career, and had taken holy orders (1694). He was to rub shoulders with men of power and in his prose writings to make a mark on English affairs, but he was not destined to be a man at court. His first living, in Kilroot, Ireland, displeased him. He returned briefly to England but in 1699 was back in Ireland as chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, a post from which he was ousted by private intrigue. He became vicar of Laracor. Deeply embroiled in religious and political affairs, he eventually became dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin. With the death of Queen Anne, the Whigs, his enemies, came to power. There was to be no further preferment for him.
In his later years he became a political enigma, “with the Whigs of the State and the Tories of the Church,” Doctor Johnson said. His treatment by parties and patrons provoked a healthy distrust of men in power and intensified his sense of personal grievance. He considered life in Ireland exile. Yet he did much for the Irish, earning their respect if not their love. Through correspondence he maintained his friendship with Pope and Gay, with Dr. John Arbuthnot, Henry St. John Viscount Bolingbroke and others in England, but his mind ran on Irish affairs. He was aware of conditions at every social level; his Toryism was of that particularist kind which will not tolerate exploitative corruption from any quarter.
His vexed relations with women, especially “Stella” and “Vanessa,” and his disgust with physical functions, have given much latitude to Freudian interpreters. Disgust informs much of the prose and verse, but so does a real interest in common people, their language, actions and concerns. The verse opens on this area of his genius, and on his darker musings. It possesses the satiric virtues of the prose with an additional element: the “I” speaks, speaks as itself, with an uncompromised acerbity that few poets have mastered. When he died in 1745, Ireland and England were in his debt. The topicality that limits the appeal of some of his prose is itself the appeal of the verse: it catches inflections and remembers small actions now lost—the voices of gardeners, street vendors, laborers, which we hear refined in Gay; the tone of a cryptic man of conscience speaking of his world, his bitter life, his wary loves. He is commemorated by a great epitaph: he lies “ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit. Abi, viator, et imitare, si poteris, strenuum pro virili libertatis vindicatorem.” Yeats translates it thus:
Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.
Boswell found Johnson’s “Life of Swift” too harsh. In thirty pages, the poems receive three succinct paragraphs. In the poems “there is not much upon which the critic can exercise his powers. They are often humorous, almost always light, and have the qualities which recommend such compositions, easiness and gaiety.” Their diction, prosody and rhyme are correct, conforming to Swift’s own notion of good style: “proper words in proper places.” Johnson’s highest praise follows: “Perhaps no writer can be found who borrowed so little, or that in all his excellences and all his defects has so well maintained his claim to be considered as original.” He is original in part because—in his mature poems—he’s so spare. As Johnson says, his thoughts were “never subtilised by nice disquisitions, decorated by sparkling conceits, elevated by ambitious sentences, or variegated by far-sought learning.” In this he resembles his contemporary the novelist Daniel Defoe, never shirking a difficult subject or elaborating for elaboration’s sake.
Trifles and bagatelles, Johnson tells us, were necessary to Swift. Many of the poems are occasioned by little more than a love of language as it is differently spoken, and a fascination with people. The activity of humble folk provides substance: to represent is at times a sufficient end. There are the “Descriptions” of “Morning,” “A City Shower” in particular, which realizes a peopled scene with slight satirical coloring:
Brisk Susan whips her linen from the rope
While the first drizzling show’r is borne aslope,
Such is that sprinkling which some careless quean
Flirts on you from her mop, but not so clean.
Bustling verbs animate scene and metaphor. Human actions rather than natural phenomena arrest attention. Ford comments on his “most unusual power of conveying scenes vividly... scenes rather of the sensibility than of material objects and landscapes.” Coleridge calls Swift—he has the prose more than the verse in mind—“anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco,—the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place.”
In the more ambitious pieces Swift challenges his reader. F. R. Leavis indicates the paradoxical nature of his approach: “Lacking the Augustan politeness, he seems with his dry force of presentment, both to make the Augustan positives... look like negatives, and to give the characteristic Augustan lacks and disabilities a positive presence.” Without “Augustan urbanity,” “spiritual poverty” and “hollowness” are underscored. There is a unique irony at work, not normative, like Dryden’s, but radical: thematic rather than stylistic. This is why his poems, even the most topical, retain force today. “I take it to be part of the honesty of poets,” he wrote, “that they cannot write well except they think the subject deserves it.” The subjects he chose he approached as if for the first time, as if we stepped from the chill, clear world of reason into a world of men. Bolingbroke was not quite fair when he suggested, “If you despised the world as much as you pretend, and perhaps believe, you would not be so angry with it.” Swift is a vigorous hater, but with a hatred rooted in disappointed expectation. He is merciless not to those below him on the social ladder but to those above, the empowered, and to the vain who persist in self-deception. Flattery is the grossest sin, chastised in the satirical “On Poetry: A Rhapsody.”
Edgell Rickword and later C. H. Sisson took Swift’s verse to heart. In a crucial essay, “The Re-Creation of Poetry” (1925), Rickword describes a “poetry of negative emotions, of those arising from disgust with the object.” “Swift is a great master of this kind of poetry. His verse has no pleasure-value beyond that of its symmetry and concision, but it is the most intricate labyrinth of personality that any poet has built around himself, not excepting Donne.” Rickword loves Donne, which makes his point compelling. Donne makes the labyrinth beguiling; Swift undecorates as he goes. The narrow, narrowing power of the verse is great. “The Progress of Beauty” and “The Furniture of a Woman’s Mind” exemplify the voice of “negative emotion.” So does “The Progress of Marriage” or “Verses on the Death of Dr Swift,” where he directs satire at himself. His imitation of Horace’s Odes, book 2, poem 6, with wry self-knowledge and a canny understanding of the world, evokes the man and those who use him. Conventional love is remote from this verse.
Swift is hard to recommend as a poet because he is hard to quote out of context. There are few purple passages, detachable maxims; the poetry is drawn evenly through the poem in ways that out-of-context quotation violates. The epitaphs, the spoofs, the eclogues, the anecdotes spoken by various voices, the ironic love poems, the first-person poems, will not be broken up into tags like the rich couplet bric-a-brac of Pope. In Swift we come upon a writer who might have preferred to be called versifier rather than poet. There is a difference in kind in his work from that of his predecessors; and he is not “polite” enough to have beguiled his contemporaries into imitation. He stands alone, he doesn’t sing, he never ingratiates himself. He speaks, and he understands how the world wags.
The most brilliant poet of the eighteenth century would have been a composite figure made up of the three poet-friends, Swift, Pope and John Gay. Swift’s savagery rooted in a concern for common people, Pope’s verve and imaginative profligacy, and Gay’s gentle good cheer might, taken together, have given us a writer of Shakespearean—or at least Chaucerian—proportions. Genius was parceled out, not combined, in the eighteenth century, and Gay was fortunate to have been given gentle, beguiling elements. “Tell me, ye jovial sailors, tell me true, / If my sweet William sails among the crew.” His epitaph reads, “Life is a jest; and all things show it, / I thought so once; but now I know it.” It is as true as Swift’s epitaph is to him.
For Pope and their circle Gay was a “play-fellow” rather than a “partner.” Pope reports that he was treated “with more fondness than respect... He was a natural man, without design, who spoke what he thought and just as he thought it.” This isn’t quite fair. Gay is a great parodist. His satirical method is different from Pope’s. He is an ironist rather than a satirist. Gay lacks the sure moral voice of Pope and the firm orientation of Swift: he will not be tied to an opinion. Amused and alarmed by human fallibility, vanity and self-deceit, he does not rise to that rage which makes and mars the satires of his friends. Evil is unclear to him; he avoids moral absolutes.
He was born in Barnstaple, Devon, in 1685. His father, who died when Gay was ten, was a Nonconformist man of affairs from established Devonshire stock. The boy was educated at the local grammar school, then apprenticed to a silk mercer in London. He disliked the job, secured his release and returned to Devon, where he began writing verse. In 1707 he went back to London to become a writer, and the next year published Wine. It celebrates wine in Miltonic parody: “Of happiness terrestrial, and the source / Whence human pleasures flow, sing heavenly Muse.” Of a Muse that failed another poet, he writes as of the fallen angel Lucifer:
Now in Ariconian bogs
She lies inglorious floundering, like her theme
Languid and faint.
He parodies the debate of the fallen angels. Closing time is like the departure of Adam and Eve from the Garden. He parodies not only Milton’s language and style, but his plot and structure, a trivial subject handled in a grand manner. The moral: water drinkers cannot be successful writers. It’s clever and sustained but, as Doctor Johnson dourly opines, inconsequential: an exercise that any decent versifier might perform. It lacks the purpose of his later parodic satires. Yet it shows how deeply embedded Milton is in the eighteenth century, how the choice of Milton over Cowley was almost complete. In Gay there are no vestiges of Swift’s first master.
In 1711 he met Pope and found himself in the best possible literary milieu, with a friend and critic who, though younger than he, could help and advise, a warrior eager to exploit his talents in his own literary vendettas. If Pope did not fully appreciate Gay’s benign genius, he valued his friendship and helped him in times of need. Gay’s nicest tribute to Pope, “Mr Pope’s Welcome from Greece,” celebrates the translator of Homer as himself a Homeric hero upon concluding his famous translation.
Gay’s talent for eccentric, accurate observation and his sense that the established literary modes were vulnerable to real experience and needed to open out toward an actual world inform all his verse. He could deflate epic, georgic, eclogue and dramatic modes by literalizing rather than ridiculing them. He laughed them back to a more inclusive life. In his “low style” he did things Swift must have appreciated, wrote ballads and burlesques. In two of his several attempts he was a considerable dramatist. He had an instinctive, if not an infallible, sense of his public.
During his two years of service as secretary to the Duchess of Monmouth (1712–14) he wrote his first notable poems and began contributing to Sir Richard Steele’s Guardian. It was his friend Pope and not a noble patron who was honored with the dedication of his first major poem, Rural Sports (1713), based on Windsor Forest. The overall form leaves much to be desired, but the detail lives. Johnson called it “realistic pastoral.” It prepared the ground for The Shepherd’s Week (1714), Gay’s best “pastoral.” Rural Sports exploits the pathetic fallacy to effect. Fish and worms behave in such a way as to suggest the animal fable, a genre he later practiced. An uninsistent religious strain sounds through the poem. Country streams are “Sweet composers of the pensive soul.”
The Shepherd’s Week, a sort of truncated Shepheardes Calender, was part of Pope’s campaign against Ambrose Philips, whose pastorals had been praised in preference to Pope’s own. Gay imports into the polite, idealized world of swains and shepherdesses some of the rollicking Devonshire peasants of his youth. Spenser and Virgil, as well as Philips, are among his targets. Convention is invaded by flesh and blood. In “Monday” he footnotes his own lines eighty-three to eighty-eight and refers to their source in Virgil:
Populus Alcidae gratissima, vitis Iaccho,
Fermosae Myrtus Veneri, sua Laurea Phoebo.
Phillis amat Corylos. Illis dum Phillis amabit,
Nec Myrtus vincet Corylos nec Laurea Phoebi.
Johnson says the pastoral can only be burlesqued into life. Gay adapts these lines as:
Leek to the Welsh, to Dutchmen butter’s dear,
Of Irish swains potato is the cheer;
Oats for their feasts the Scottish shepherds grind,
Sweet turnips are the food of Blouzelind.
While she loves turnips, butter I’ll despise,
Nor leeks nor oatmeal nor potato prize.
This form of traduction into common diction and experience marks Gay’s parodies, especially his dramatic masterpiece The Beggar’s Opera (1728), a “Newgate pastoral” composed at Swift’s suggestion. It sets out to discredit the Italian opera that had held the stage in London for ten years. This “ballad opera,” as Johnson called it, was an unparalleled success. The sequel, Polly, banned by Walpole, sold well when it was published (1729). Swift commented on the predominance of humor over wit in these works; the rules are parodied and satirized—marriage and honor for example—but finally upheld. Despite having parodied opera, Gay became Handel’s librettist for Acis and Galatea (1732) and Achilles (1733)—staged after his death.
He had left the service of the batty Duchess of Monmouth in 1714 and served under the Duke of Clarendon at Hanover. Queen Anne’s death brought this brief appointment to an end and he experienced no courtly preferment thereafter. Like Swift, he felt disappointment: his sense of the social world clouded, his poetry matured. In 1713 he’d published The Fan; but in 1716 he published Trivia. The change is remarkable. The Fan follows too closely on the heels of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. It is weak because it is unsystematic and unsubtly overstated. It does not grasp the real firmly enough to mythologize it. It is literary, in the spirit of Wine. But Trivia: or the Art of Walking the Streets of London is the great evocation of London in verse. It originates in Juvenal’s third satire, as Johnson’s “London” does, but it is gentler and, though less powerful, more complex than Juvenal’s poem. The parodic target is Virgil’s Georgics and the fashionable georgic tradition. An ironic contrast between the rural order, which the form imposes, and the disorder of city life, which is the subject, provides the humor. In an even georgic tone he describes bizarre and terrible incidents. The Great Frost, evoked in the second section, includes an account of the death of an apple vendor:
’Twas here the matron found a doleful fate:
Let elegiac lay the woe relate.
Soft as the breath of distant flutes, at hours
When silent evening closes up the flowers;
Lulling as falling water’s hollow noise;
Indulging grief, like Philomela’s voice...
Doll, the fruit vendor, is decapitated as she falls through the ice, her voice dying in the “pip-pip-pip” of her pippin cry. The incongruity between manner and matter is a measure of Gay’s ironic power. The reader remains uncertain of the poet’s tone.
“Nothing about Trivia is straightforward,” says Marcus Walsh, “not even the title, which means primarily crossroads, but is also a Roman name for the goddess Hecate.” Not only the title, but words, parodic passages and scenes are equally complex. A bootblack is begotten by immaculate conception; Vulcan visits Patty and makes her patterns. As in a good georgic, we receive advice, but here it is about our dress for walking the London streets: suitable shoes, coat, walking stick, hat; about the weather and the sights to see. We hear creaking shop signs, wagons and carriages rumbling by, street cries. There is mud, a street fight, pickpockets, whores, chairmen, vendors, watchmen, rakes. The values that inform georgic poetry are parodied and rejuvenated.
In 1720 Gay published his Poems on Several Occasions with success. He lost the money he made, however, in the South Sea Bubble fiasco and was so disappointed that, had Pope and his circle not come to the rescue, he would have died. He became commissioner for the public lottery in 1722, and spent his later years at various houses, especially with the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, who took his chaotic affairs in hand. In 1725 he published “To a Lady on her Passion for Old China,” a sustained polite moral satire: “What rival’s near? a China jar.” Two years later The Fables appeared, written for Prince William, later Duke of Cumberland. In 1738 sixteen posthumous Fables were published, more overtly moral and satiric than the earlier pieces, and in epistolary form after the manner of Pope. Gay died in 1732 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
The Fables proved popular, running through fifty editions before 1800, a poetry bonanza for his publisher, along with Thomson’s The Seasons and Pope’s work. The Fables were illustrated by Thomas Bewick and later by William Blake. Gay uses his animals to illuminate human nature, either by contrast or caricature, varying the tone and approach. Some are serious, others simply comic. The moral, as Johnson says, cannot always be drawn. When he adopted fable form, he found literary parody difficult, since fable itself is parody. Gay is compelled to neglect one of his best skills and modern readers feel its absence. “The Elephant and the Bookseller,” “The Butterfly and the Snail,” “The Two Monkeys,” and the fox fables stand out from the rest. But they are less entertaining than Trivia. They are frail compared with Henryson’s fables. Yet no one has written a poem to vie with Trivia as living verse documentary and brilliant parody. Pope wrote Gay a fuller epitaph than the one he provided for himself, and it touches on the paradox of Gay’s innocent integrity:
Of Manners gentle, of Affections mild;
In Wit, a Man; Simplicity, a Child;
With native Humour temp’ring virtuous Rage,
Form’d to delight at once and lash the age;
Above Temptation, in a low Estate,
The uncorrupted, ev’n among the Great;
A safe Companion, and an easy Friend,
Unblam’d thro’ Life, lamented in thy End...
“A safe Companion”: Pope had few of those. Ford’s account of him is not inaccurate, though it is peremptory and unkind. “It has well been said of Pope that his work divides itself into three periods which correspond to the three reigns under which he wrote. Under Queen Anne he was a personal pastoral English poet; under George I he was a translator and ‘made much money by satisfying the French-classical taste of his day with versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey and with bitter-sweet poems of the bag-wig and sword-knot type’... The heavy materialism and gross agnostic alcoholism settled on the country that had driven out the Stuarts and forgotten the piety and music of Herbert and Donne; so Pope turned his mind to the problems of his age. And in a series of poems that were ‘serious’ and censorious enough he made his muse sing his day.”
Unkind, not inaccurate, to say that Pope is one of the first verse businessmen, setting out to make a living free of any patron except public esteem; among the first to flatter for a living not a nobleman or monarch (though he does both) but a party. He writes with assurance and authority which set at nothing the animosity his character arouses. He wrote even his letters for publication; in his privacies (there are few intimacies) he felt himself to be on show, accountable to his idea of himself.
Developing Dryden’s measure, the heroic couplet, Pope recovers complexities of the poetic process that Dryden had refined away. He thinks in metaphor, shape and form; he does not decorate a line of thought. Thought matters less in his work than in Dryden’s. There are none of those spiritual crises which matured Dryden’s ideas and gave them abiding weight. For Pope the crises were not religious or political but social and literary. If as a man he was crudely ambitious, in some respects dishonest, in love with his role as a poet and with material profit as a writer above all else, he did command deep friendship from discriminating men—Swift and Gay, but also Bolingbroke, Arbuthnot and others. That is so much to his credit that bad report is partly answered. At the heart of his work an unresolved philosophical contradiction provokes much of the best verse. Of twentieth-century poets W. H. Auden most resembles him in his omnicompetence, ambivalence and social character.
Alexander Pope was born in Lombard Street, London, in 1688. His Roman Catholic father was a merchant, and both parents were advanced in years when the little misshapen poet came into the world. From a protective home he acquired not religious certainties, but the instincts of an entrepreneur. In the year of Dryden’s death, when Pope was twelve, the family joined a Catholic community in Windsor Forest. Soon the young Pope was writing imitations of Waller, Cowley, Rochester, Chaucer and Spenser, and translating from Thomas à Kempis, Ovid, Statius and Homer.
At the age of twelve he contracted the first of a series of illnesses that, with his physical disability (a hunched back), left him nearly an invalid for the rest of his life. He read eclectically and was encouraged to write. In the year when illness beset him, he wrote a poem imitating Cowley and indebted to Horace, “On Solitude”:
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.
Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.
Blest! who can unconcern’dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,
Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mix’d; sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.
Like the voice of an inmate of Gray’s churchyard, its resignation (a literary stance) is credible because the form is so astonishingly achieved, phrases building precisely, now gathering evidence, now deploying it, so that the conclusion is not only just but inevitable. The second stanza anticipates the future poet: fields yield bread and sheep clothing, the images translated into a market value: it matters less what they are than what they provide.
When he was nineteen, his Pastorals appeared in Tonson’s Poetical Miscellanies, Part VI. Pope insists more than once that he wrote the poems when he was sixteen, along with “A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry,” in which he sets out, in a short space, to summarize the critics’ conflicting accounts of the mode: “You will also find some points reconciled, about which they seem to differ, and a few remarks which I think have escaped their observation.” His adolescent hubris is beguiling and a little intimidating: Dryden is a guide, Spenser a model, but in both he finds faults that he sets out to remedy as much in his prose discourse as in the poems themselves. The poems are of little interest today: they are stiff with eager correctness. But the poet’s accomplishment was auspiciously welcomed. In 1711 perhaps his best nonsatirical composition, An Essay on Criticism, appeared and the Spectator and the Guardian took up the young prodigy. He was twenty-three.
Pope attributed the virtues of his Pastorals not to observation of nature but “to some old authors, whose work as I had leisure to study, so I hope I have not wanted care to imitate.” Here is literary—entirely literary—eclogue. In the first lines, along with classical echoes, we hear Spenser, Milton and Waller. The syntax is classicizing and at times silly. “Two swains, whom Love kept wakeful, and the Muse / Poured o’er the whitening vale their fleecy care.” The Muse appears to be both wakeful and a shepherdess—until we realize that she is a second cause for insomnia after love. Lapses of syntactical clarity are common in Pope. Thomas De Quincey sees the problem as “almost peculiar to himself. It lay in an inability, nursed doubtless by indolence, to carry out and perfect the expression of the thought he wishes to communicate. The language does not realise the idea: it simply suggests or hints it.” Pope indolent? Surely not, surely not at the age of sixteen. Injudicious, inexperienced perhaps, but never indolent. De Quincey is talking about the mature work. Pope is a treacherous “model of correctness.”
Yet couplets from the Pastorals reveal the virtues of his writing, too: “their fleecy care” is a roundabout way of saying “sheep,” but it has the effect of stressing the shepherds’ responsibility (an abstract meaning) and physically evoking sheep (and their use). It combines pictorial and moral elements. The technique is deployed in Eloisa to Abelard (1716), a romantic “heroic epistle” unique in his work.
In these deep solitudes and awful cells,
Where heav’nly pensive, contemplation dwells,
And ever-musing melancholy reigns;
What means this tumult in a Vestal’s veins?
“Deep” and “cells” are apprehensible to the senses; “solitudes” and “awful” are abstract. Parallel construction mingles the terms: hermitage and state of mind. Within solitude a hierarchy is proposed: melancholy reigns, contemplation dwells: a pensive, ever-musing kingdom, shaken by earthly desire. “Vestal’s veins” is oxymoronic in effect. Pope attaches shapes and scenes, most vividly in the passage in which tears distort the visible world for Eloisa, the speaker:
Can’st thou forget what tears that moment fell,
When, warm in youth, I bade the world farewell?
As with cold lips I kiss’d the sacred veil,
The shrines all trembled, and the lamps grew pale...
This miracle of a passage suggests the poet Pope might have become with different priorities, other admirers. Eloisa to Abelard, undramatic yet gripping because of its close-textured, consistent evocation—developing imagery of lips, eyes, tears, pallor, coldness and burning—can lay claim to being the last achieved English epyllion, just as his Pastorals provide the last, almost asphyxiated gasp of Spenserian eclogue. The subject is human nature and passion at their most paradoxical. Pope never tried the mode again, perhaps because it gave him only limited scope for what De Quincey described as his “talent for caustic effect.” Besides, the subject was “unwholesome”; it may have shaken him.
“Windsor Forest” suggests another might-have-been. He observes nature less through “old authors” than through his own eyes; we see (stylized) something like the Forest itself. The scene is brittle, natural detail presented in terms of artifice and carrying a moral or interpretative weight. Transitive verbs energize the verse, fusing concrete images and abstract qualities:
Oft, as in airy rings they skim the heath
The clam’rous lapwings feel the leaden death.
Oft, as the mounting larks their notes prepare,
They fall, and leave their little notes on air.
“Leaden death” for “shot” or “bullet” suggests the physical weight of ammunition and checks the skyward movement of the previous line. Mounting larks are shot and fall, their music left suspended.
In 1712 Pope was getting to know Swift, Gay, the neglected poet Thomas Parnell and the genial physician and polemicist Dr. John Arbuthnot, who invented John Bull. They became pillars of his social world and collaborators in works for stage and page, and they began inventing the Scriblerus Club. The Rape of the Lock was published by Barnaby Bernard Lintot in his Miscellany. (In The Dunciad Pope later compared Lintot to “a dabchick,” which was ungracious since Lintot had printed his work and was an honorable publisher.)
Two years later an extended version of The Rape appeared. This chief of English mock-heroic poems, the verse masterpiece of Queen Anne’s reign, grew out of an actual event but, in a satirical spate against polite ladies, pursued a social foible to absurd lengths, into “the moving toyshop of their heart.” The lady’s very boudoir is displayed, her ritual of social preparation disclosed. The drama of her stolen lock of hair is delicious, trivial, the satire tart rather than corrective—and it charms. Pope is at home in the world he describes, half seduced by its opulence, and if not willing to forgive, reluctant to chastise excesses, which he pushes in his poem to further excess. Yet at the fringes of his poem a cruel social world peeps in:
Meanwhile declining from the noon of day,
The Sun obliquely shoots his burning ray;
The hungry Judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jury-men may dine;
The merchant from th’ Exchange returns in peace,
And the long labours of the toilette cease—
We skitter merrily past the “wretches,” but they stay suspended incongruously above a world of “Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux.” A politician reading these lines might have foreseen what the little poet would do on a different scale.
In 1713 Pope issued proposals and started to raise subscriptions for his translation of Homer’s Iliad. It appeared between 1715 and 1720 and profited him greatly, despite a spoiling effort by Thomas Tickell, who published the first book of an Iliad two days after Pope’s Iliad, books 1–4, appeared, and numerous critical attacks. All publicity proved good. In 1725–26 the Odyssey less successfully followed, produced with two assistants (by then, like a painter, he had an atelier to prepare the huge Homeric canvases: his minions primed them and he added a verbal stroke here and there and called them his, as indeed the contracts for them were). In his Iliad Pope fully mastered the couplet, with a finality at times glib, for the form forces parallelisms and imposes rigid pattern on the matter. It is suited more to aphorism and satire than narrative. Yet he made the couplets—intermittently—flow. Johnson’s estimate of the translation is as high as Pope’s estimate of Dryden’s Virgil: “the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever seen.” Less generous and less successful Grub Street residents dubbed him the “poetical undertaker.” In 1725 his six-volume edition of Shakespeare was published: he was almost as much of a literary factory as Johnson.
His Shakespeare was not good and its numerous errors and inconsistencies were exhibited by Lewis Theobald in Shakespeare Restored, a timeless error on Theobald’s part since he earned for himself the role of principal butt in the original Dunciad, and even his admirable 1734 edition of Shakespeare, a model for later editors, did not restore his name. Pope was not a man to cross. Fortunately Colly Cibber offended Pope even more severely than Theobald had done, for Cibber, whose life as an actor and writer was remote from Pope’s experience, was made poet laureate in 1730. In the 1743 four-book version of The Dunciad Cibber replaces Theobald.
When I say Pope profited from his writings, I can be specific. Patronage was at its height under Queen Anne, and there was a settled market price: five to ten guineas for the dedication of a play, less for the dedication of a poem. With the accession of George I this changed. Writers became too proud and independent to sue for patronage. From Lintot Pope got £16 2s. 6d. for the first book of Statius (1712); £7 for The Rape of the Lock; £32 5s. for “Windsor Forest.” Homer was published by subscription; Lintot paid Pope £200 for each of six volumes. In the end Pope realized £5,324 4s. on this work. Johnson estimated that the cost of living, about 1730, was in the region of £30 per annum. Thus Pope’s little epigram “On Authors and Booksellers” is a little harsh: “What Authors lose, their Booksellers have won, / So Pimps grow rich, while Gallants are undone.” The best printer-booksellers dealt more or less honorably with their better authors, as dairy farmers deal with good cows. A sense of the economics of the trade emerges when full records exist, and of course for a businessman of letters like Pope, records survive.
On the proceeds of his writing, Pope was able to settle in Twickenham in 1718, in his famous house with a grotto, with his recently widowed mother. There he lived until his death in 1744. He practiced a frugality that rivaled Swift’s, but without Swift’s excuse. Success did not spoil him, but the pleasures of prosperity induced him to undertake projects he should have left alone, especially the Shakespeare.
The substitution of Cibber for Theobald in the Dunciad—poet for scholar—is arbitrary and tells against the virulent generality of the satire. That the substitution required so little adjustment to the text shows how removed from its targets, how merely scornful, and how unintegrated it is. Pope attended to the surface of the work, but the satire only occasionally deepens and tells. The four books progress toward the triumph of eternal Dullness (“born a Goddess, Dullness never dies”) and exploit different modes of humor from book to book. First Pope deploys literary satire and parody, advancing through coprological, sexual and even sadistic forms of humor. The fourth book remains most vital, scourging habits and institutions of education. But the verve of the language exceeds its occasions, a kind of overkill. In all but the fourth book the satire, unlike Dryden’s, lacks a moral norm which, by contrast, it endorses. Where is Pope firing from? He did not dislike the society in which he found himself, though he did at times dislike himself. De Quincey calls the rage “histrionic,” for effect, and goes further: Pope was a hypocrite, his insincerity spilled over into his nonsatiric work.
He translated Horace’s satires with his usual skill, but even there we’re tempted to agree with De Quincey. We should fight temptation: Pope is morally uneven but eludes categorical condemnation or endorsement. He is often at his best with borrowed anger. In 1735 he wrote his “Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot” (later called “The Prologue to the Satires”), combining satire with personal statements of intense candor. His skill in composing whole poems is intact, even after the Essay on Man (1733–34) which, despite memorable aphoristic passages, fails as didactic and philosophical verse. It was attacked and defended for its morality; now it is excerpted for its good passages but neglected as a whole. Johnson’s verdict is just: “Never was penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised.” Technically a tour de force, it is hollow at the center. De Quincey asks, which should have been Pope’s greatest poem? The Essay on Man. And which was in fact his worst? The same. It “sins chiefly by want of central principle, and by want thereof of all coherency amongst the separate thoughts.” Compared with the Essay on Criticism, written twenty-two years before, it looks still more invertebrate. Pope became professional in the worst sense.
His techniques can deal with almost any theme; but his sense of structure and his ability to present consecutive, consistent thought are limited. Johnson remarks on his “poetical prudence”: “He wrote in such a manner as might expose him to few hazards. He used almost always the same fabric of verse; and, indeed, by those few essays which he made of any other, he did not enlarge his reputation... By perpetual practice, language had, in his mind, a systematic arrangement; having always the same use for words, he had words so selected and combined as to be ready at his call.” A dangerous facility: “His effusions were always voluntary.” For De Quincey his satiric rages were similarly factitious. In the Essay on Man he bit off not more than his style could chew, but more than his intellect could digest.
Pope’s intellectual incompleteness can be attributed in part to his age, for much more than Dryden he was a man of his time. He’s been called a “cosmic Tory,” a social optimist (though closer to Hobbes in his evaluation of the individual), believing “whatever is, is right” and converting the status quo into a universal ethic. In such an approach there is a cool, impersonal arrogance that he shares with some of his journalist contemporaries—a new breed—who couldn’t quite bring themselves to choose between deism and Locke’s psychology, but felt confident in rejecting traditional theology as outmoded. Pope remains intellectually “between.” He distrusts empirical inquiry as strongly as Swift did, but without Swift’s reasons. For such a mind the appeal of authority should be great; Pope is wary even of authority.
The imagination “gilds all objects, but alters none.” Such an aesthetic is a world away from the Sidney of the Apology. Pope wants not to expand imagination and understanding but to formulate and give permanent expression to thought and experience; not to particularize but to establish general truths. That nature conceals, under its varied surface, a basic pattern or harmony, is a worked-up belief, as willed as the language itself. He was able in the Essay on Man to change the description of nature as a “mighty maze, and all without a plan” to a “mighty maze but not without a plan” when it was suggested that his vision was too negative. So radical a change, casually made, reveals the shallow current of his thought. Thus Theobald and Cibber, scholar and poet, were interchangeable in the Dunciad. His rancor was arbitrary. The closing lines reflect on the themes of the poem, but perhaps also on its willful structure or construction.
Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal darkness buries all.
The best of Pope is wonderful, but excellence is found in extenso only in the earlier poems, translations and satires. Later it emerges locally: the shiny surface of his philosophical disquisitions yields like thin ice when we walk out upon it. His best writing depends on the elusive way he makes solid an abstract or moralizing passage by combining unexpected words, and by rhyme that seals the “conjunction disjunctive” (Coleridge’s phrase) of the couplets. Dryden’s couplets tend to be self-contained; Pope’s contain at their best a paradox, an irresolution, which compels us to read on. They create suspense. He makes whole poems when he avoids the temptation to try for a total statement.