POPE AND HIS TIDIES.*

THROUGHOUT English literary history, the fame of the little poet of Twickenham will remain the type and monument of a whole age of literature, probably the weakest in poetry and strongest in prose which has sig- nalised our annals. Nothing can dignify Pope with the name of a great poet ; nothing can rob him of the fame of a past-master in all the graces of expression and all the facilities of rhyme which man may compass by the un- Fparing practice of a consummate art. He cultivated the power and point of the ten-syllable rhyme till its use could not well go further. As an instrument for blank verse, or for the varieties of the seductive sonnet, its value had long before been demonstrated in all the sweep and power of the Eliza- bethan day. Goldsmith made much of it in his own way, but it was reserved for Lord Byron, the different master of a different time, to press the decasyllabic rhyme into the service of the narrative poem, and to prove by his " Corsair" and " Lara " that it might be made to move • The Age of Pope. By John Dennis, Author of "Studies in Englith Liters- are." dm London George Bell aLd Sons. 1891.

with all the rapidity and rush of the ballad or the Bong, un- stayed by elaborate metaphor and untrammelled by excess of workmanship. Nothing is more marked than the difference between the satiric form of Pope and Byron in the use they make of the decasyllabic, one all grimness and humour, the other all point and art. For as an artist, Pope has never been surpassed. And he remains as distinctly the foremost figure of the literary age of Queen Anne as does Tennyson of the

Victorian period, or Shakespeare himself of the Elizabethan days. Mr. Dennis's book brings out the true proportions in clear and well-considered relief. It is an excellent specimen

in all ways of the commentator's work ; and often as we have read of them by other hands and in other forms, we feel that Mr. Dennis helps us to realise again something of the living realities of Joseph Addison, and Jonathan Swift, and " Dicky " Steele, familiar friends of literary history of whom

we never seem to tire. It is amongst the prose-writers that Mr. Dennis rightly classes all these three ; for Cato and Addison's famous hymn, and the famous line about riding the whirlwind and directing the storm, have not won the king of essayists a place among the poets, and in spite of all his voyages in verse, it is as " Gulliver " that Swift lives for ever. Pope's single-minded devotion to his Muse was the secret of his pre-eminence, as it has been of Tennyson.'s.

The special purpose of Mr. Dennis's book is to form one of a series of handbooks edited by Professor Hales, which it is to be hoped, he tells us in his preface, will be of service to students who "love literature for its own sake, instead of regarding it merely as a branch of knowledge required by examiners." A "handbook," indeed, is scarcely a fair description of so readable and companionable a volume, which aims not only at giving accurate information, but at directing the reader's steps "through a country exhaustless in variety and interest." What we fear of books of the kind is not that they should fail through want of deserving, but that they should be favourites rather with those who love to have their Popes and Swifts recalled to them, than with stu- dents who have to be induced to acquaint themselves with the originals. This has always seemed to us the especial danger of all this increasing form of literature. Nothing is easier than to turn from the Pope, for instance, of the "Morley" or the "Marzials " series to the "Pope and his Friends" of Mr. Dennis, and gradually grow so acquainted with the Annists —if such a word may be coined as counterpart to Victorians and Elizabethans—as to be almost with them in their habits as they lived, without having studied anything of the originals at all. It is not, however, our business to do aught but linger with Mr. Dennis for a column or two over our good old friend,—to wonder again over the ferocity of hia attack upon Addison (with a parity of astonishment that anybody can

ever have sat out and admired Cato at the theatre), and to linger again over the delightful picture of Belinda in the "Rape of the Lock," which Mr. Dennis calls the most perfect specimen of poetical burlesque in the language :— "On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore, Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore.

. . . . . . . . .

Bright as the sun her eyes the gazers strike, And, like the sun, they shine on all alike.

Yet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride Might hide her faults, if belles had faults to hide.

If to her share some female errors fall,

Look on her face, and you'll forget them all."

That Mr. Dennis is a true critic of our own time, at all events, may be inferred from the contrast which he drawa between these lines and Eloisa's answer to an invitation from the spirit-world, where Pope is at his high flights :—

" I come ! I come ! prepare your roseate bowers, Celestial palms and ever-blooming flowers. Thither, where sinners may have rest, I go, Where flames refined in breasts seraphic glow : Thou, Abelard ! the last sad office pay,

And smooth my passage to the realms of day; See my lips tremble and my eye-balls roll, Suck my last breath and catch my flowing soul ! Ah, no !—in sacred vestments may'st thou stand, The hallowed taper trembling in thy hand. Present the Cross before my lifted eye, Teach me at once and learn of nee to die."

That Porson delighted in reciting, or rather singing, these. lines from beginning to end, in his cups or out of them,.

while Steele declared that "The Temple of Fame" had a

thousand beauties, and Johnson, th tt every part of it was splendid, is but a proof of how the canons of criticism varir from age to age. Mr. 1/ nnis's summary of Pope is a good one, and as near the truth as we are now likely to arrive. He takes a first place in the second order of poets. He is not one of the first poets because— "He cannot sing, he has no ear for the subtlest melodies of verse, he is not a creative poet, and has few of the spirit. stirring thoughts which the noblest poets scatter through their pages with apparent unconsciousness. There are no depths in Pope and no heights ; he has neither eye for the beauties of Nature, nor ear for her harmonics, and a primrose was no more to him than it was to Peter Bell."

But, on the other hand,— "His merits are of a kind not likely to be affected by time, a lively fancy, a power of satire almost unrivalled, and a skill in using words so consummate that there is no poet, excepting Shakespeare, who has left his mark upon the language so strongly. . . . . . . He has said in the best words what we all know and feel, but cannot express, and has made that classical which in weaker hands would be commonplace. His sensibility to the claims of his art is exquisite, the adaptation of his style to his subject shows the hand of a master, and if these are not the highest gifts of a poet, they are gifts to which none but a poet can lay claim."

All this, and more, we fairly hold of Pope, whose name still carries a charm with it that better men have failed to secure.

His famous " Homer " was in itself a great as well as a patient achievement. Nobody's gifts were ever less like Homer's. His translation is not the least like the original. But it remains the best that has been made, and it is some- thing to know that he made 29,000 out of it, as well as a fortune for his publisher. Mr. Dennis believes that he was the first poet who was able to live by his works without the help of patronage or the theatre.

Besides Pope himself, Mr. Dennis passes in review Prior and Gay, Thomson and Rowe and Akenside, Colley Cibber and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and many others of that courtly day. He has more than a good word for Prior's graceful wit, and the appreciation with which his age re- ceived him. And we agree like him with Moore rather than with Mr. Austin Dobson, that a "grammatical lapse"

may be sometimes an advantage rather than otherwise, when it gives a charm to the "Address to a Child of Quality":— "So when I am wearied with wandering all day,

To thee, my delight, in the evening I come, No matter what beauties I saw in my way ; They were but my visits, but thou art my home.

Then finish, dear Chloe, this pastoral war,

And let us, like Horace and Lydia, agree, For thou art a girl as much brighter than her, As he was a poet sublimer than me."

What child of any quality could desire anything prettier ? And Mr. Dennis is quite right in thinking that any one familiar with Moore would without hesitation attribute the stanzas to the Irish singer. As for Young, of "The Night Thoughts," he advises the unwise student who has suffered tinder the poem of that name to console himself with Blair's "Grave," as being fresher and more vigorous, commending for their unfligging force the lines:— " Tell us, ye dead! will none of you, in pity To those you left behind disclose the secret ? Oh! that some courteous ghost would blab it out, What 'tis you are and we must shortly be."

We are rather at issue with our critic as to the effec- tiveness of this "consolation," holding such a remedy to be a little worse than the disease ; though we can agree with him in being susceptible to the charm of Thom.

son's "Seasons," and in wondering how anybody could listen to a representation of Sophonisba. Bat it is a curious moral on the change of taste that the "Seasons" was for many years the most popular poem in the country, and that a copy was to be found in every cottage. Martin Tupper was to succeed it afterwards. Rowe of the Fair Penitent, and Aaron Hill, doctor and dramatist and all things besides, with the Irishman Parnell, from whom we have a quotation surpassing to our mind most in the volume, supply further material ; while an extract from Tickell suggests an appropriate reference to Matthew Arnold, and the consequent comparison with "a world of poetry wholly unlike that in which even the best of the Queen Anne poets lived and moved." In the chapters on Addison and Steele and Swift, we must refer our readers to Mr. Dennis himself, as to his just comments upon the " Dunciad," where, famous as tt is, facility of rhyme and personal spite provoked Pope into onslaughts quite unworthy of him. We could never quite understand what can have induced Pope to instal Colley Cibber, of all men, in the chair of dullness. Cibber was a very bad poet, certainly, like other people ; but as comedy-writer and actor, everything proves him to have been a great and deserved favourite. He appears to have been a kind of Dundreary of his day; and the satirist who set down the late comedian Sothern as a dunce, would have been very much at sea indeed in his satire, but no whit more so than Pope. It is an odd thing that the personal virulence of the little "hunchback of Twickenham" was always leading him wrong in the application of his powers. The famed lines about Addison are immortal because of their supreme art and point, but as applied to Addison, they are simply ridi- culous. All the lovers of the literary age of Anne will turn to Mr. Dennis for refreshment.