ALEXANDER POPE. 1688-1744.

I.

Our first selection in this volume takes us into English life a little over two hundred years ago. Queen Elizabeth has been dead a hundred and nine years, Shakespeare ninety-six. The Renaissance has spent its force, the civil wars between Cavalier and Puritan which had wrecked England during the central seventeenth century are over, and the last Stuart has worn an English crown. England since 1688 has been a constitutional monarchy. Queen Anne is now on the throne; Addison and Steele are just about to establish The Tatler and The Spectator. Swift, an older man, greatest of our satirists, has already written The Tale of a Tub, and is about to throw himself energetically into politics; but he will not publish Gulliver's Travels for fourteen years. The rising poet is a young man twenty-four years old, Alexander Pope; every one is reading his Rape of the Lock, that clever society poem which is so amazingly well-written, and hits off in such an entertaining way a number of well-known people.

From the time when this poem was written till the end of his life, Pope remained the true representative of the tastes and standards of his day. He was the poet of a time that had turned away, bored and sated, from romance, from passion, faith, and devotion to beauty, toward clear thinking, keen observation, and accurate and clever expression. We twentieth cen

tury folk have undergone another reaction in taste. It seems to us that either the age of Shakespeare or that of Wordsworth produced greater poets than that of Pope. But there is still much for us to enjoy in the literature of what is called the Age of Prose and Reason, or the Pseudo-Classic Age; and we have important things to learn from it.

Pope was born in 1688, the year of that Revolution which finally established England as a country under Protestant rule. His father, a retired linen-draper, was a Roman Catholic, and the family faith shut the boy off from the usual education of an English gentleman, which in those intolerant days was open only to Protestants. Perhaps he did not lose much by being self-educated. At all events, when he was only a tiny fellow, he already showed that absorbing enthusiasm for letters and the intellectual life which he was never to lose. Literary work was the object and central interest of Pope's entire career. Milton laid aside his poetic pen for twenty long years of his maturity, in order to serve his country. Shakespeare wrote his plays partly, at least, for practical reasons. But Pope lived only to write, and there is little story to tell of him beyond the story of his life-long devotion.

The boy "lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." When eight years old, he was already reading the classics lovingly, and making translations from the Latin poet, Statius. At twelve, he wrote four thousand lines of an epic, and it is significant of the early ripening of his powers that he used lines from this epic toward the end of his life, in his greatest work, The Dunciad. When only sixteen, he pub

lished a series of "Pastorals" which at once gave him literary standing in the eyes of his contemporaries. We may be allowed today to find these poems artificial and flat; yet we shall not do amiss if we ask how many lads of sixteen could now show such unfailing accuracy in the use of metre, such choice mastery of diction, or could write with such fluent ease and grace.

From this time till his death in 1744, Pope worked at his chosen art; practicing what the times called "niceties of versification," ardently polishing his lines, and turning them with equal deftness, no matter what subject engaged his attention.

The literary life of the age was far more concentrated than it is now. It centred in London, and the authors of the day all knew one another more or less intimately. They formed little coteries, often marked by bitter rivalry, the members of which met for keen interchange of wit and gossip at the various coffee houses or clubs, where politics, literature, and religion were the great topics of discussion. Pope tried to share this gay, exciting life of "the Town,” but he was not strong enough for it. He withdrew into a certain amount of seclusion, in his beloved country-house at Twickenham, on the banks of the Thames, and here the world found him out, for he was a very famous man; here, till his death at the age of fifty-six, he passed his time, writing his books, amusing himself by laying out his garden in the fantastic taste of his time, and busily entertaining his friends; discussing philosophy with Bolingbroke, or literature with Swift, and too often, more's the pity, wasting his energy on some personal quarrel or con

troversy which embittered his spirit and added venom

to his pen.

Pope is a vivid personality to us still. He was a sickly and puny little man, bald-headed and deformed, inclined in youth to hypochondria, and always afflicted with extreme nervous sensitiveness and excitability. He was capricious, jealous, and self-centred; capable of sharp, unreasonable suspicions and antagonisms; and he took cruel reprisals on his adversaries with his clever verses. But when we are tempted to distress by the petulance and acrimony which he sometimes showed, we must remember how much he constantly suffered. One can not read of him without compassion, or without respect for the delicacy and dignity of his reticence concerning his personal ills. There is also a fine side to his character.

He was a devoted son, who nursed with unfailing tenderness the last years of his aged mother. To the few people whom he trusted, like Swift, Gay, and his honored friend, Martha Blount, he showed a staunch and loyal affection. Above all, we must respect his disinterested and steady service to the cause of letters.

In religion, Pope never nominally deserted the faith of his fathers; but his writings show that his real sympathy was with the facile Deist philosophy of the time, which he immortalized in the Essay on Man. No one now would consider this a great philosophical poem, or rank Pope as a profound thinker. But he was a clever and honest man, and an admirable writer. Was he also a great poet? His own age thought so; Lord Byron thought so. Today, every reader must decide the question for himself.

II.

When Pope was very young a critic, William Walshe, had given him a piece of advice which influenced him greatly. He told Pope that "there was one way still left open by which he might excel any of his predecessors, which was by correctness; that although we had had several great poets, we as yet could boast of none that were perfectly correct, therefore he advised him to make this quality his particular study." Correctness may seem a pedestrian aim for a poet; originality, emotion, beauty, the thrill of an intenser life, are what most of us seek in poetry. But to Pope, correctness meant the same thing as perfection, and we can recognize something fine and elevated in the painstaking enthusiasm which sought to express perfectly what is already known, rather than to record a personal experience, or to press into undiscovered regions. Our poetry, which had often been extravagant and obscure during the great period of the Renaissance, needed just what Pope, following his predecessor, Dryden, sought to give it: grace, ease, precision, and conciseness of utterance, the control of vagaries, the mastery involved in perfect art.

Nine-tenths of Pope's work, exclusive of his long translations, was written in one verse-form, the heroic couplet. He did not invent the couplet; Dryden, before his day, had established it as the favorite and dominant form; but Pope polished it. He could not endow it with more rhetorical force than Dryden had done, but in his hands it gained a more unfailing point and flash. The great romantic period which preceded the Pseudo-Classic Age had revelled in blank