BOOKS AND WRITERS

pOPE was more than forty. It was well over ten years since he had published the folio which contained the musical expression of his wanderings in fancy's maze ; there had been the labour of Homer, a piece of work thoroughly well done though partly collaborative ; and the less well done, but arduous, edition of Shakespeare. For strenuous relaxation there had been The Dunclad and its rollicking Variorum, the central piece of the final Scriblerian efflorescence of which Gulliver's Travels and The Beggar's Opera were the opposite extremes. What was to be done next ? He wrote to Caryll in December, 1730:

"I very rarely dip my pen. The vanity is over: and unless 1 could hope to do it with some good end . . . I would never return to the lists. But the truth is, it is now in my hopes, God knows whether it may ever prove in my power, to con- tribute to some honest moral purposes in writing on human life and manners, not exclusive of religious regards, and I have many fragments which I am beginning to put together."

Indeed he had been at it some months, as Spence records, and as he himself had written to Swift. And had not Bolingbroke earlier said that he was " deep in metaphysics " with Pope ? So it was that Pope came to stoop to truth, that is, to pounce on the actual way men lived. And soon he came to conceive his remaining life work as one great didactic poem, in several parts, of which the Essay on Man was one, the Moral Essays a portion of another, with yet further additions which were never written. Better work, the glowing Imitations of Horace, broke into the scheme, which Was never completed, though some of the matter was caught up in The New Dunciad which we know as Book IV.

When, from February, 1733, the Essay on Man crept piecemeal and anonymously into the world, it was a subject of warm discus- tion and even violent controversy. Nobody doubted but that it was a great poem, because it dealt vividly and warmly with ideas that Were still vibrant and vital. Later, when such a collection of ideas seemed inchoate and meaningless—so swiftly had the climate of thought changed—the argument circled about whether it was a poem at all, Byron defending it as one of the noblest of human utterances, De Quincey dubbing it a "'lotus siccus of pet notions." Though it never fell altogether out of popular esteem (did not Mr. Churchill quote the superb opening of Epistle 11 in his Harvard speech ?) it sank out of sight in literary estimation. The word didactic was enough to damn it together with the Moral Essays. It was foolishly assumed that Pope had put into cold couplets somewhat shallow ideas that Bolingbroke had stuffed into his head— without Pope's quite understanding them—and the matter was supposed to be settled. But since the Essay happens to be poetry, and since it deals imaginatively with elements in the human situation which are permanent, it continues to live and is increasingly read.

It is, in the first place, an amazing intellectual feat, exhibiting great powers of sustained organisation. Beautifully constructed, it collects together a vast body of the assumptions by which men live, ordering them into a progression made plain by the " argument " which heads each book. That is the intellectual progression. But it goes deeper than that, as Professor Maynard Mack points out in the brilliant elucidatory chapter of this first-rate edition*. (We have come to expect the volumes of the Twickenham Edition to be first-rate.) For together with the traditional European ideas culled from sources Christian, Stoic and Platonic, the poem once again expresses the Renaissance picture of order, of the breaking of order and then the healing. That is the imaginative progression. And with Pope the healing is carried out by the social sense which is the development of love: his theme is the progress of mankind towards the unity that has been broken by pride.

But, of course, for us, to whom the ideas are no longer vital— we do not, for instance, conceive of the Chain of Being as set out in the Essay, nor speak in terms of "the ruling passion "—the question is, how far is it poetry ? We are inclined to agree with De Quincey that the phrase " didactic poetry " is a contradiction * An Essay on Man. Edited by Maynard Mack. (Methuen. 30s.) t Epistles to Several Persons. Edited by F. W. Bateson. (Methuen. 25s.) in terms. If poetry teaches, we think, it "can teach only as nature teaches, as forests teach, as the sea teaches, as infancy teaches, viz., by deep impulse, by hieroglyphic suggestion." It must not address " the insulated understanding." Possibly ; but it all depends upon how far the poet's vision creates in him the emotiona) pressure from which poetry flows. It must be confessed that the Essay on Man suffers from what Professor Renwick has called " uneven transformation," and here and there the insulated understanding only is addressed. But then, as Coleridge said, no long poem ought to be all poetry, and the Essay ever and again rises magnificently into incandescence, because Pope is all the time singing—yes the moralised song remains song—of creative plenitude. As always, he is positive, hating the negative, deathy element much of the philosophy of his day contained. He is concerned with what

" Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Glows in the stars and blossoms in the trees Lives thro' all life, extends thro' all extent, Spreads undivided, operates unspent."

He is always for the warm and the fructifying ; and, however much he may accept the mechanistic universe, he is concerned to tell us that " Whate'er of life all-quick'ning aether keeps

Or breathes thr. air, or shoots beneath the deeps,

Or pours profuse on earth ; one nature feeds The vital flame, and swells the genial seeds."

The poem, moreover, is brilliantly organised poetically, in rises and falls by way of paragraphs which, as Professor Root points out, approximate to sonnets. And all the while the texture and the phrasing keep us alert, in images that demand attention if read carefully. (Pope must always be read carefully; you cannot rush along as you do, say, with Shelley.) There are such evocative phrases as

" From the green myriads in the peopled grass ; " Or " And meteor-like flame lawless thro' the void ; "

Or

" In folly's cup still laughs the bubble joy," besides the great passages, and the beautiful swing of the final warm tribute to Bolingbroke.

It is, of course, a middle poem. It has no tremendous myth, no great poetic symbol ; it is written deliberately in the half-colloquial epistolary style, as are the Moral Essays (as we have come to call them) edited, again perfectly, by Mr. Batesont. These are, perhaps, the least exciting of Pope's works, but they are redeemed by brilliant passages of comment or satire or nature description. The morals are trite, but that does not matter ; it is not the business of the poet to be an original philosopher, but to feel intensely the philosophy he clings to. And here again, as in the last epistle in the series though the first to be written, the " garden poem " addressed to Burlington, creative plenitude is stressed. After describing Timon's disastrous garden (not Cannons, and Timon was not the Duke of Chandos) the theme of creative plenitude comes out:

" Another age shall see the golden Ear Imbrown the Slope, and nod on the Parterre, Deep Harvests bury all his pride has plann'd, And laughing Ceres re-assume the land."

And it is this that lies behind all Pope's comment, his brilliant pictures of Atossa and Clot, of Cotta and Villiers, the flaring witty passages, the pungent strokes ; it is this that inspires the magnificent mastery of his lines. Here, too, the thought is well conducted— Mr. Bateson restores the order Warburton had so brutally mis- handled in the " death-bed edition "—and if not original, at least not shallow. The "death-bed edition " ? it may be asked. Readers of Spence will remember that a little before his death Pope sent out a few copies of his ethic epistles. "Here am I," he commented to those around him, " like Socrates, dispensing my morality amongst my friends just as I am dying." The fiery, bright, and dauntless spirit—the epithets are Swinburne's—sparkled to the end.

BONAMY DOIREE.