BOOKS
The Dwarf of Genius
BY J. H. PLUMB FIRSTLY, a salute to the Oxford University Press! For many years now they have been producing superlative editions of the letters of the great Masters of English literature—Jane Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot, Dr. Johnson and the rest—and there are many more yet to come. They are the product of the best traditions of English and American scholarship—nothing is missed, not a scrap; every allusion is remorselessly bunted down; and an index, of exemplary com- plexity, usually takes up the final volume. To some these seried volumes, bristling with scholarship, seem too lavish, a waste of time, energy and money, but not to me. Scholarship Which will last for centuries is always worth While, a task worthy of a University Press. Far better that scholars of English literature should be thus employed than in wasting their talents on the fatuities of literary criticism, or, worse, the criticism of criticism.
Professor Sherburn has been assiduously col- lecting Pope's letters* for more than twenty years and although his haul of new material is con- siderable in bulk, it is, on the whole, trivial in quality, but there are a few letters which help to elucidate a little further the strange ravelled character of Pope, that dwarf of singular genius.
* * • All understanding of Pope must begin with his deformity, an ugly, terrible sight which he, as much as his friends, wished to ignore but could not, Like an ineradicable dye it stained all thought, all feeling. Deformity is commonly hideous in its effects: It corrodes character, lead- ing to deceit, treachery, malignity and false liv- ing; and as often as not vitiates those entangled in the sufferer's life as much as the sufferer him- self. So it was with Pope. Yet cruel as was his fate, he also had his luck; luck to be born with a poetic gift as certain, as infallible as .mathe- matical genius, a perfect instrument for the expression of his vast abilities; and luck, too, to be an Augustan, to belong to a world which looked to poetry for that social criticism in which it revelled. But, of course, Pope was far more than a satirist. He used the modes of his time to express his strong emotional nature. His poetry eased his own heart as much as Keats did in his Odes. But Pope's heart needed to be eased of hate not suffering, detestation not pity, emo- tions which are as much a part of human experi- * THE CORRESPONDENCE OF ALEXANDER POPE (five vols.). Edited by George Sherburn. (0.U.P.. £10 10s.)
ence as compassion. This savage, brutal attack on Sporus:
Sporus, that mere white curd of Ass's milk? Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings, This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings;
which mounts in twenty magnificent lines to a crescendo of vituperation, is More, far more. than a brilliant satire of Lord Hervey. It expresses hatred, that intense loathing which can develop between one human male and another, an experi- ence as common and as deep as romantic love between the sexes, but far less readily admitted. In discharging his venom so brilliantly Pope was rising above mere satire, giving a universality to hate.
There was a sweeter side to Pope's nature and some moments of forgetfulness, times when the frustration and the pain and the ape-like world were forgotten; times when the gay intelligence sparkled to its own delight. To these we owe the felicity of the Rape of the Lock and many of the minor poems. If he could, Pope would always have had it so, for he longed for respect, friend- ship, love. An adored and deceiving image of himself lurks mockingly in his poetry and his letters; it is that of a good, noble, incorruptible man, free from sycophancy, just in his dealings, loyal to his friends, direct in his purpose. Nor do the lines that express these high sentiments ring entirely hollow. They are a part of Pope's dream world, a part of that loving consolation by which he contrived to ease his pain. And, of course, such admirable virtues provided a self-deceiving excuse for his vast and rancorous hate; for the good surely have a right, a duty, to hate the bad. He could not, would not, recognise that his loathing sprang from his desolate, fatal isola- tion, from his little, twisted body. Only rarely were his defences broken; once they were pierced by his love for Martha Blount, and in Eloisa and Abelard he acknowledged his own tragic circumstance:
Hearts so touch'd, so pierced, so lost as mine Erc such a soul regains its peaceful state, How often must it love, how often hate!
How often hope, despair, resent, regret, Conceal, disdain—do all things but forget.
These moments of poignant insight were, alas. rare. Could Pope have lived with himself, face to face, he might have been one of the greatest poets of all time. The sight was too grievous, the knowledge too intolerable, and both his nature and the age in which he lived turned him away from a direct expression to a social criticism in which the ferocity of personal feeling could be transmuted into moral condemnation.
Although the basic structure of Pope's charac- ter was always clear enough from his poetry, his letters alone present the full picture of his strangely involuted temperament. They do not, of course, reveal Pope in direct terms any more than his poetry does. They are guarded letters, and, alas, very dull ones. They convey little. Pope's mother lived to an immense age. He was devoted to her. He mentions her time and time again (usually her illnesses which prevented him so frequently from gratifying his friends). And she remains a word, 'mother.' No picture of her is ever drawn; she might have been any old woman. Quite fruitless, too, for any one to go to these letters in the hope of gaining fresh insight into Pope's fascinating friends—Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, Bolingbroke and the rest. Neither character nor anecdote interested him at all. There is no sparkle in his prose, and in the dull and wearisome journey through this Sahara of correspondence it is a relief to reach a letter from Swift, from Gay, from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu or even from Bolingbroke.
No, these letters are not for the general reader unless he happens to be a connoisseur of human temperament. For him the sandy journey offers a rich reward, for the Pope of the letters makes the Pope of the poetry seem as simple as a child. Obviously he was addicted to double-dealing as compulsively as a kleptomaniac to stealing, and' like other practitioners of vice, his taste grew more complicated with age. No sooner had he, as a favour, deposited manuscripts in Lord Oxford's famous library, than his lordship found that the fact was being used to justify Pope's veracity in public combat with a publisher, a fact Pope forgot to mention to Oxford. He asked, or rather begged, his noble friends to treat him like a domestic servant, but it was they who fetched and carried for him, parcelling up his Homer and protecting him from libel. He servilely ate Walpole's dinners, whilst consorting with his enemies. Having contrived presentation at Court, he immediately parodied the Royal Family. He wrote anonymous letters to secure the publication of his own correspondence; brought out two editions, one official and one pirated, both by himself. He cheated his life-long friend Swift and in the end very nearly double-crossed himself. There are other odd and very unpleasing characteristics. His delight in prevarication, his relish of the half-given lie, and his gloating in obscenity. Add to this his intelligence, discernible even in these letters, and remember his excep- tional charm—the fine features, the brilliant eyes. He knew that he possessed the power to exploit it. He could, and did, entrance as well as disturb. And further, he was sensitive to the pain of others, quick to help, generous, attentive, and so, perhaps, lulled into, security those he had not intended to betray. From these letters emerges a creature stranger far than his poetry reveals—a tortured, tortuous being who carried the force of genius in the tiny body of a dwarf—a fate which neither fame nor achievement, love nor friendship, but only deceit and chicanery, betrayal and revenge, could sweeten or alleviate.
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