I CHAPTER I ALEXANDER POPE N the eighteenth century, England for the first time succeeded to the intellectual leadership of the civilised world. This fact was at the time obscured by the supremacy of the French vogue, which France put forward as the only source of intellectual life. But in reality, during the eighteenth century, up to the time of the great Revolution, France did not produce a single new, great idea, but adopted English suggestions, and assisted to spread them throughout Europe. Montesquieu and all the French philosophers of the century owed their reputation to Locke. Had it not been for the English "freethinkers," Toland, Collins, and Tindal, and the moral philosopher Shaftesbury, where would Voltaire, Diderot, and the Encyclopædists have been? Lastly, had it not been for the English romance writers, Defoe and Richardson, where would Rousseau himself have been? England's influence in individual cases (as it also affected Germany) will be discussed in the proper place; here we need only record the fact of England's entry into the world of the literature of Europe and her powerful influence upon the revolution that took place in the intellectual life of the modern civilised world two hundred years ago. Certainly at first, in treating of Pope, we must pass through a period of French influences; but, both in and after his time, the effects of English thinkers upon France, and consequently upon Europe, become more clearly apparent. Collier's essay (p. 271) had purged the stage of its worst filth. The Revolution of 1688, so harmless in form, so full of blessings in its results, at the same time exercised an improving influence upon the moral behaviour of the people, or rather of the upper classes. William III. (1689-1702) certainly had no appreciation of English literature, and consequently had no desire to direct its course. Queen Anne (1702-17), narrow-minded and utterly devoid of taste, exercised an improving influence by her mere existence; the sex of the head of the State compelled writers, who valued the approval of court circles, to use decent language. Literature, thus cleansed and rendered independent, was subsequently able to pass scatheless through the period of the first two Georges (1714-27 and 1727-60); the determining influence of royalty upon purely intellectual matters was broken for ever in England. Under George III., the most mediocre, although not the most wretched of the "four Georges," England was destined to see the second growth of its literature. The period between the Revolution of 1688 and the middle of the eighteenth century beheld in English poetry the absolute supremacy of form, of empty verse making, of estrangement from nature. Common sense took the place of heart-felt passion, nicely calculated elegance that of untrammelled vigour. And this change was manifest not in literature only, it can be seen in most other manifestations of culture. The human body sacrifices its natural comeliness to artistic embellishments, the wig is forced upon the beautifully curled head, the farthingale conceals and the laced vest disfigures the noble forms; the man disappears under the productions of the friseur and the fashionable tailor. Poetry loses greatness and all purely human qualities. Heart no longer appeals to heart, but understanding to understanding. A man writes, not because he has something to say, but in order to show that he is a master of rhyme. To the poets of that age it is a matter of complete indifference what the subject of their verses is,-a forest or a tea-cup, the death of a friend or a little poodle, God and immortality, or the morning gown of a court lady: the main point is, that it should be set forth in harmonious verses. Familiarity with poetry of this kind makes us feel as if we were dealing with nothing but Chinese porcelain ware, with polished, variegated little figures, nodding pagodas with dislocated necks and limbs, and feelings cold as marble. Amidst all this polished material, how one longs for a warm-toned human figure, if only of simple terra cotta! Even the perfection of form is repugnant, for it is nothing but ceaseless industry devoted to empty nothings, like the handicraft displayed in certain Chinese ivory carvings. Genuine, deep feeling disappears from poetry. Feeling is not "good form"; language exists only to draw limits between heart and heart. There is no sound of song: men no longer sing, they chatter or write letters. It is the age of dumb literature. Certainly, the forest is green and the brook murmurs; the human heart, as ever, rejoices and bleeds; but poetry takes no heed of such very ordinary things. In Andersen's Tales, the Chinese Emperor and his pig-tailed household are charmed by the artificial nightingale; in like manner, English society, under Queen Anne and the first two Georges, is charmed by the verse-making of its famous poets, which bears but the outward semblance of poetry. But one day the artificial songster breaks to pieces; the Emperor, with all his household, conducted by the little kitchenmaid, goes forth into the green wood and hears the real, the living nightingale sing; then the scales fall from the eyes of the people, and all see that they have been long deceived by a song produced by an elaborate piece of machinery. To the middle and end of that period of literature belonged. ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744). His outward appearance and education were significant of his literary position. He was a dwarf, four feet high, always in ill health, so crook-backed that he was obliged to wear stays; he could neither dress nor undress himself, and had to sit at table on a high stool specially made for him, even in company. When quite young he was completely bald; three pairs of the thickest flannel stockings one over the other were necessary to give the impression that he had something like legs! It is repugnant to enter into these petty personal details; but, in the case of Pope, they are part of the man and the poet. And the dwarf's body contained a dwarf's soul, which could only live on applause,-malicious, slanderous, revengeful. Outwardly, he reminds us in many respects of Voltaire, but he lacked one of Voltaire's great saving virtues,-his willingness to sacrifice himself for others, his flaming wrath at public injustice, his devotion to a great cause. 66 Alexander Pope, the son of a well-to-do London merchant, was mainly indebted to himself for his education, with the exception of a certain amount of irregular attendance at school. From his earliest childhood poring over books, he tells us himself that when fourteen years of age he had read the Greek, Latin, English, and French poets in the original and the Italian in translations! If that is a fearful thought, we are even more horrified, on reading Pope's Ode on Solitude, to learn from a note by the author that it was written at the age of twelve!" This Ode, with the exception of one passage, shows all the good qualities of the poet already fully developed; his fine ear for musical cadence of expression, his polished versification, his appreciation of the right word in the right place. But it shows something else-Pope's intrinsic lack of true poetic feeling, even an antagonism to it! A boy of twelve years, he sits himself down and turns out an elaborate verse exercise on "Solitude," without any internal impulse, he who was never able to exist without society and applause from his early youth: in the same manner, when a man, he sets himself to write upon any subject you please, quite after the manner of improvisatori, who produce a certain number of metrically correct lines on any given theme. What he began at twelve he continued for forty years; he always remained true to himself. Like a verse machine he reeled off poem after poem; we can almost fancy we are in the presence of an automaton, not a man with life-blood in his veins. Pope's poetical effusions exhibit no traces of human or poetical development. In later years he was called the "prince of rhyme"; he was that already, when a boy and a young man, if indeed he ever went through those stages of life, for everything in him has so precocious, so senile a ring, that one is involuntarily reminded of the old men's faces of the dwarfs and sorceresses of fable. In form, Pope is almost faultless; but how tedious is this very faultlessness! It is like a long, straight grove of poplars. As a poet, he has pronounced his own death sentence in the preface to his ́so-called poem, Essay on Man: he could just as well have written it in prose, but he chose rhymed verse because "principles . . . so written both strike the reader more strongly at first and are more easily retained by him afterwards." Pope is the greatest of those English poets who may be left unread without any qualms of conscience, unless one desires to learn what was regarded as poetry at the beginning of the eighteenth century in England, and therefore over nearly all Europe. His poems are like beautiful, variegated tulips, which gladden the eye with colour in carefully-marked-out flower-beds; but one must not seek fragrance from them like that of the plain, simple rose. He never succeeded in a single human character; not even the shortest ballad bears his name. In the history of literature he still has a place, like a curious plant in a dry and dusty herbarium. When sixteen years of age, the precocious boy published a collection of Pastorals, which are no worse, but rather better than most of the pastorals of the eighteenth century. At the same age he also wrote his elegy (printed later) Windsor Forest, a study, decidedly agreeable in certain passages, in harmonious verses. Several times we can even detect the echo of a tone of sentiment, we fancy we can hear the forest rustle and the Thames flow, but the rustling and flowing is in reality nothing but the symmetrical swell of the rhymed iambic pentameters. During the period of his absolute supremacy, Pope made this metre almost as indispensable as the French classicists their Alexandrines. For us at the present day this iambic doggerel is even more intolerable than the Alexandrine, in which the rhymes recur at somewhat longer intervals. In one thing the Englishman Pope has the advantage over his French contemporaries; he never condescends to bald flatteries of the monarch and the greatness of his country. In the reign of Louis XIV., what panegyrics would not a Frenchman have pronounced on the incomparable owner, to whom forest and stream owe their beauty, of the royal summer residence which he was describing! The Englishman Pope, on the contrary, even makes use of so idyllic a poem to express his love of freedom. In it we find the beautiful lines:Fair liberty, Britannia's goddess, rears Her cheerful head and leads the golden years. Again, the vigorous and prophetic words upon the world-wide influence of England and London in the distant future: The time shall come, when free as seas or wind Oh, stretch thy reign, fair peace, from shore to shore, His Essay on Criticism, written when he was twenty-one, which appeared in 1711, although differing in matter from Boileau's Art Poétique, was suggested by the latter, as both were by Horace's Ars Poetica. Pope's precepts for the use of the critic are no better than Boileau's instructions to the poet; a stupid collection of hackneyed phrases, which contain nothing new to any educated man. If we remember, in addition, that this high-flown wisdom is paraded by a young man of twenty-one, who has himself produced practically nothing, the feeling of weariness is aggravated by one of repugnance to this consequential precocity. In a passage in his Essay on Criticism, Pope expressed himself strongly against a preference for form at the expense of matter. When, however, the great theorist of one-and-twenty soon afterwards set to work upon his sole imaginative poem, he had forgotten his teaching. The Rape of the Lock (1712) is nothing but a trifle, polished in form, but intrinsically valueless. It belongs to the group of pigmy poems, which at that time were highly in favour, but can no longer force even a smile from anyone,—to the comic epics. Pope's models were the Secchia Rapita (Rape of the Bucket) by the Italian Tassoni, and Boileau's imitation Le Lutrin (the reading-desk, chorister's desk). Pope and Boileau in turn suggested the feeble Renommist (braggadocio) of Zachariä. Immermann's Tulifäntchen (babies' clothes) is, however, quite independent of them. The incident which forms the subject of Pope's Rape of the Lock is a real one. A London dandy, Lord Petre, had secretly cut off one of the lovelocks from the head of a beautiful society lady, Miss |