THE NEW EDITION OF POPE'S WORKS.* NEARLY thirty years have

passed away since an advertisement in the Quarterly Review announced a new edition of Pope's works, under the editorship of John Wilson Croker and Peter Cunningham. The promised volumes never appeared, but con- siderable materials had been accumulated by Mr. Croker, which were placed in the hands of Mr. Elwin, when at a later period he accepted the responsibilities of editor. The late Mr. Dilke, who has done more to unravel the mysteries of Pope's life than any critic of the poet, also placed his rich stores of information at Mr. Elwin's disposal, and there seemed good ground for believing that the world would possess an edition of Pope worthy of the poet's position in the literature of his country. The first volume appeared at the close of 1870, two more volumes were issued, if we remember rightly, in the spring of 1871, and a fourth in the summer of that year. There was then a long

• The Works of Alexander Pope. Edited, with Introductions and Notes, by the WT. Whitwell Elwin and William John Courtbope, M.A. London ; Murray.

pause, and it was not until the winter of 1872 that another volume was announced. It was the last to be issued under Mr. Elwin's supervision. Apparently, he had grown weary of a task upon which he had been engaged many years. It seemed as though he felt inclined, like Cornus, to " curse wit and poetry and Pope," as though lie had become estranged entirely from his work, at the very time when he may be said to have reached the heart of it. It was assuredly no want of knowledge or of literary competence that stopped him in his task. Mr. Elwin's familiarity with Pope and with the literature of the period was at once comprehensive and minute. He knew the man and his age, and wrote of both with the ease that comes from a perfect mastery of his subject. But unfor- tunately, he wrote with prejudice ; it was evident from the out- set that he cared little for his theme, that he detested Pope's personal character, and had no profound admiration for his genius as a poet. Whether this were the cause of his retire- ment from the post of editor, we cannot say. The edition came to a stand-still, but no reason for the delay was publicly an- nounced. Month by month and year by year, students of Pope waited in expectation of volumes which failed to appear, and it was to be feared that the work so auspiciously commenced would stand upon our shelves imperfect.

This fear is now removed. Mr. Courthope has taken up the task dropped from the weary hands of his predecessor, and his energy and zeal promise to bring it to a successful conclusion.

The third volume of the poetry published under his super- intendence contains much of Pope's finest work as a satirist, the four "Moral Essays," the far-famed" Prologue to the Satires," and the almost equally famous " Imitations of Horace." These form the principal contents of the new volume, but the editor has seen fit to class with the " Moral Essays " several Epistles that have been hitherto published among the miscellaneous pieces, to change in one instance the order of the " Imita- tions," and to group with them two poems written, or attempted to be written, in the familiar style of Swift, and also the " Ode to Venus." These are, we think, unworthy of the place they now occupy. Interesting as the efforts of a poet and a wit, they scarcely deserve to be classed with poems upon which Pope may be said to have staked his reputation as a satirist. Mr. Courthope is, indeed, too prone to make questionable alterations. In the "Moral Essays," the second epistle, hitherto headed " To a Lady," is now addressed —as, in fact, no doubt it was—" To Martha Blount ;" and the second epistle of the second book of Horace has the name of " Colonel Cotterell " attached to it throughout, as if that title had been given by the poet. It is an uncertain heading, at the best, for as the editor shows, Warton is the only authority for the name ; and he also frankly admits that Warton's ex- planatory note on the subject " must be wrong, either altogether or in part." These are venial faults, but we hold that they are faults, since an editor should be chary of making changes even in trivial points, unless there be a strong and reasonable ground for so doing. And here, while noticing some slight de- fects that have struck us on examining the volume, we may observe that Mr. Courthope's illustrative notes are always sensible and satisfactory, but that when he gives a literary criticism of the text, his opinion is sometimes fairly open to dispute. We may be wrong, of course, but we venture to think that few readers familiar with Pope will agree with the asser- tion that nowhere is his " exquisite selection and composition of words more conspicuous " thau in the familiar lines with which he introduces his characters of women :-

" Come, then, the colours and the ground prepare ! Dip in the rainbow, trick her off in air ; Choose a firm cloud, before it fall, nod in it Catch, ere she change, the Cynthia of this minute."

And it is almost with a smile we read the judgment pronounced on the "Ode to Venus," which it is said deserves, for light- ness of touch, to be classed with the " Rape of the Lock."

No doubt, Pope is more fortunate in this ode than iu some of his attempts at lyrical measures, but the lightness of touch is just what we fail to find. There is ingenuity in the ode, but it is the ingenuity of a poet who undertakes to write a lyric without an ear for music, and to move gracefully in a measure over which he has no command. There is, we think, no poet of Pope's standing so utterly deficient in the spontaneity and easy grace, the consummate art which resembles nature, and the delicate sense of melody, that are among the supreme gifts of the lyrist. Pope has a charming ease of his own, and one can imagine with what a hearty zest it would have been appreciated by Horace, but it is not the ease that delights us in the lyrics of the Sabine poet; for Horace knew how to sing, and Pope has no voice for song.

In an introduction to the " Moral Essays and Satires," Mr. Courthope reviews Pope's purpose and position as a satirist. In the main, he adopts the view held by Mr. Pattisou. Pope's satire is due to genuine feeling, but in many cases to a feel- ing that is utterly perverse. He means what he says, but his words are too often dictated by jealousy and spite. He never cares to attack vices in the abstract, but must link them to the characters of men and women with whom he is offended. " His most pungent verses," says Mr. Pattison, " can always be re- ferred back to some personal cause of offence," and Mr. Court- hope, with equal justice, observes that "a large element of per- sonal or party feeling underlies his most solemn protestations of

public spirit." Pope was not hypocritical as a satirist, but he was immoral because he was unjust. At the same time, it can- not be denied that the venom of his verse adds largely to its in- terest, and that the more we know of the age, the more do we

learn to admire the consummate art of the poet. How his satires enable us to read the man as well as the town life which he has depicted with such singularly vivid touches, is thus pointed out by Mr. Courthope :—

" Pope's personality," he writes, "is more visible in his verse than that of any other English poet. Read in connection with the story of his life, his bright and pointed satires enable us to track, minutely, through all their intricate obscurity, the windings of his remarkable character. We see him distinctly in his several relations to his friends and his enemies, to his parents and the public. The magic of his art, which gives a kind of fascination to his daring literary frauds, extends its influence alike over the greatest and humblest of those who came within the circle of his acquaintance, or on to the list of his enemies. It is easy to understand why Swift should have been so eager to be commemorated in one of his Epistles, and why poor Alderman Barber was ready to pay a small fortune for a compliment in a couplet, since even at this day he contrives to raise a certain in- terest in Ralph, Welsted, and Concanen, the grubs and straws and worms' who have been preserved in the amber' of his verso."

This is true in the main, but it is surely an exaggeration to say that we are able " to track minutely through all their intricate obscurity the windings of his remarkable character," for this is what no reader and no critic has ever yet succeeded in doing.

We learn, no doubt, from his poetry a great deal about Pope ; but the more our acquaintance grows, the more diffident do we become as to our knowledge of his personal character. It may be true that " in his poetry we are in contact with the nature of the man himself," for all poetry possessing vital force must to some extent express the heart of its creator. Pope's character, however, is, as the editor observes elsewhere, " remarkably complex." He is " a contradiction still." We happen to know, in many cases, that what he says is precisely what he does not mean ; that when he draws his own portrait, the lines are fre- quently false, and that he.liked nothing better than to put his readers on a wrong scent. And the perplexities felt by the biographer who wishes to convey an honest impression of Pope, are experienced also by the critic who desires to see the poet in his verse. Indeed, if, as Mr. Courthope admits, the obscurity of personal allusion becomes almost desperate in Pope, owing to his " unconquerable propensity to mystification and intrigue," it is scarcely reasonable to suppose that we shall be able, while baffled by these surface-difficulties, to achieve a task which is so much more arduous. Pope's want of veracity and straight- forwardness was shared by his earliest commentator, Warburton, a man in whom ambition was stronger than principle, and whose learning was more showy than profound. His influence over Pope during the latter years of his life was far from being wholly for good. To him, the poet left the task of publishing the final and authoritative edition of his works ; and in undertaking it, lie seems to have thought more of himself than of his friend. " Warburton," says Mr. Courthope, " not only slurred over the explanation of difficult passages in Pope's text, but to promote his interest, or to gratify his spite, lie did not scruple to misrepresent the plain intention of his author, and to intro- duce into his notes irrelevant sarcasms of his own. Such a perversion of his trust, of course, raises the further presumption that he may have.tampered with the text itself, which we know differs in several important respects from all the editions pub- lished in Pope's life-time." Mr. Courthope considers, there- fore, that 1Varburton's edition should be approached with con- siderable caution. Warton, who succeeded him, was a far more honest man, and he possessed a knowledge and a love of poetry

to which the Bishop of Gloucester could make no claim. But Warton, with his vast stores of knowledge, did not always know

how to apply them. He was careless, he was illogical, he was sometimes superficial, and his love of ease prevented probably the concentration of purpose and the judicious examination of authorities demanded from an editor of Pope. Bowles, a pupil of Wartou, undertook the work in which his master at Win- chester had comparatively failed. He has been called the most poetical of Pope's editors, and his name is familiar to readers who know nothing of his edition, owing to his controversy with Lord Byron. " His general view of the poet," writes Mr. Courthope, "was too much coloured with animosity," a remark which may be applied with equal truth to the criticisms of Mr. Elwin. Roscoe, on the other hand, praises without discrimina- tion, and in order to exalt his hero, shuts his eyes to facts. He is Pope's eulogist, not his critic.

After briefly noticing his predecessors, Mr. Courthope comes to the conclusion that Pope has suffered more from his commentators than any other great satirical poet. It would seem, indeed, that their notes, instead of clearing the way for a modern editor, have served rather to obstruct it. Pope's text is burdened with annotations, the greater number of which fail to make it clearer, and to sift these judiciously re- quires no small amount of critical acumen. Mr. Courthope's hard task has been admirably accomplished. He writes with the decision of an editor whose opinion upon knotty points has been reached after careful investigation. He tells the reader all, or nearly all, that is requisite for a due understanding of the text, he has the art of compressing much information into a few lines, his command of literature is exten- sive, and he does not forget to act upon the opinion expressed in the Introduction, that an editor " who makes any admissions to the moral disadvantage of the author of whose reputation he has become, in a sense, the trustee, is bound to vindicate more jealously his literary genius." This volume, the most important probably of the series, tests his skill as a commen- tator, for it contains several difficult questions which no editor of Pope can pass by without discussion. We do not think Mr. Courthope is always right,—in his elaborate discussion of the Atossa scandal, for instance, he fails, in our judgment, to make out his case,—but good-sense is the prominent feature of his criticism, and he has also enough of enthusiasm for his theme to treat it with animation. In the Introduction, he undertakes to do battle for Pope with a critic who is always shrewd, if not always generous. Mr. Leslie Stephen's monograph on Pope, in English Men of Letters, is injured, in Mr. Courthope's judg- ment, by an under-note of disparagement that runs through the volume. "The fact," he writes, "strange as it seems, is that Mr. Stephen, whose own literary qualities are of a kind that peculiarly qualify him for appreciating Pope, has little sympathy with his author. He surveys the literature of the eighteenth century from the position of superiority, which critics of the nineteenth century have long imagined themselves entitled to occupy ; and he judges the poetry of Pope as a de- cided advocate of the Lake school, to which the former is in spirit so essentially opposed. Hence he often manages to con- vey to the reader, doubtless unintentionally, a very inadequate and even an erroneous impression as to the general character of Pope's poetical style."

Mr. Stephen argues that Pope's style was in a sense artificial, even in his own days, and that it grew up under the influence of foreign models, " not as the spontaneous outgrowth of a gradual development, and had, therefore, something mechanical and conscious, even when it flourished most vigorously." " It came in," he adds, " with the periwigs, to which it is so often compared, and, like the artificial head-gear, was an attempt to give a dignified or fall-dress appearance to the average prosaic human being." There is a measure of truth in this, and one naturally recalls what Wordsworth has said upon the subject, but Mr. Courthope shows with considerable force of argument that it is not the whole truth. Pope's style may, he says, be marked to some extent "by artifice and affectation," but that in him which is characteristic and peculiar to himself, and which marks his extraordinary influence on the course of our litera- ture, is as certainly "the spontaneous growth of a gradual development, as it is a living force in the present day." The controversy opened up by Mr. Courthope, if not altogether uninteresting, is out of place. It is fitting that he should dis- cuss the merits or demerits of Pope's diction, for that is a topic of general interest for all students of poetry ; but it is scarcely advisable to occupy several pages of an introductory notice to the "Moral Essays and Satires " in an attempt to controvert

the judgment expressed by another critic. It is more to the purpose to dilate, as Mr. Courthope does with much ability, on the characteristics of Pope's satire. Apart from the sound sense of his verse and the personal interest with which his satires abound, he considers that "the characteristic nature of his satires gives them a rare historical value :"—

" If Shakespeare and Milton are the representative poets of England after the Reformation, if Dryden reflects in his verse all the influences of the Restoration, Pope was no less surely the poetical spokesman of the Revolution of 1688. From his natural genius, as well as from the company he kept, he was well qualified to express the thoughts of an aristocracy which, after an age of unsettlement, had become the ruling power in the State, and which was bent on establishing authoritative social standards of morals, taste, and breed- ing. Of the society which grew out of the Revolution, we ourselves are the lineal descendants, and in Pope's satires we find a bright reflection of the men and things whose influence helped to form the manners, habits, thoughts, and feelings which, however modified by circumstances, have lasted into our own epoch. He shows us the rise of Woman as a controlling power in society and politics ; the extension among the nobility of an Italian taste in painting and architecture ; the hatred felt by the Catholics for the monied middle-class, which was the backbone of the Revolution, the mainstay of Whiggery, and the bulwark of Protestantism Besides, we have suggestive glimpses of the interior of society at a time when St. James's was the extreme West End of London, and old Burlington House was but just built. The British youth' appear at their diversions at White's Chocolate House, Hockley-in.the-Hole, or Fig's Aoademy. Complaints are heard from polite society of the degradation of the Stage, in consequence of the public passion for spectacles. The penniless 'man of rhyme walks forth' from the Mint, and the dealings of the ill-lodged bard of Drury Lane with his aristocratic or com- mercial patrons are exposed in the full light of pitiless ridicule. As we read, the society of the past rises before the imagination in its dramatic reality. The age in many respects may have had the defects of its poet, but, like him, it was not without generous qualities; it is at least full of human and historical interest, Whether it be regarded as the period when the British Empire first began to rise, or as the aristocratic stage of English society, in which the realities of character displayed themselves with a frankness wanting in our own democratic times, when the individual is apt to disguise his natural impulses, in deference to public opinion."

The age is, no doubt, one full of interest to the sndent of history, and indirectly Pope helps to throw much light upon it. Unlike such poets as Burns and Blake, who speak directly to the heart, and whose imagination has its source in profound and passionate feeling, Pope appeals chiefly to the intellect nursed in a town atmosphere. He is the poet of wit, the master of literary artifice. If, like Paganini, he can play but upon one instrument, his skill in the use of that is exquisitely subtle, and Mr. Swinburne says truly that matched on his own ground he never has been, nor can be.

The volume is a notable contribution to English literature, and the publisher is to be congratulated on the prospect of seeing before long the completion of a great work which, in spite of much cost and labour, seemed at one time likely to prove a failure.