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CHAPTER XXIV.

POPE, AND THE ARTIFICIAL SCHOOL.

Contemporary History,
Birth and Early Life.
Essay on Criticism,
Rape of the Lock.

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LEXANDER POPE is at once one of the greatest names

in English literature and one of the most remarkable illustrations of the fact that the literature is the interpreter of English history. He was also a man of singular individuality, and may, in some respects, be considered a lusus naturæ among the literary men of his day.

CONTEMPORARY HISTORY. He was born in London on the 21st of May, 1688, the year which witnessed the second and final expulsion of the Stuarts, in direct line, and the accession of a younger branch in the persons of Mary and her husband, William of Orange. Pope comes upon the literary scene with the new order of political affairs. A dynasty had been overthrown, and the power of the parliament had been established; new charters of right had secured the people from kingly oppression; but there was still a strong element of opposition and sedition in the Jacobite party, which had by no means abandoned the hope of restoring the former rule. They were kept in check, indeed, during the reign of William and Mary, but they became bolder upon the accession of Queen Anne. They hoped to find their efforts facilitated by the fact that she was childless; and they even asserted that upon her death-bed she had favored the succession of the pretender, whom they called James III.

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In 1715, the year after the accession of George I., the electoral prince of Hanover,-whose grandmother was the daughter of James I., - they broke out into open rebellion. The pretender landed in Scotland, and made an abortive attempt to recover the throne. The nation was kept in a state of excitement and turmoil until the disaster of Culloden, and the final defeat of Charles Edward, the young pretender, in 1745, one year after the death of Pope.

These historical facts had a direct influence upon English society: the country was divided into factions; and political conflicts sharpened the wits and gave vigor to the conduct of men in all ranks. Pope was an interpreter of his age, in politics, in general culture, and in social manners and morals. Thus he was a politician among the statesmen Bolingbroke, Buckingham, Oxford, Sunderland, Halifax, Harley, and Marlborough. His Essay on Criticism presents to us the artificial taste and technical rules which were established as a standard in literature. His Essay on Man, his Moral Epistles, and his Universal Prayer are an index to the semi-Christian, semi-Grecian ethics of an age too selfish to be orthodox, and too progressive to be intolerant. His Rape of the Lock is a striking picture of social life, sketched by the hand of a gentle satire. His translations of Homer, and their great success, are significant of a more extended taste for scholarship; not attended, however, with many incentives to originality of production. The nobles were still the patrons of literature, and they fancied old things which were grand, in new and gaudy English dresses. The age was also marked by rapid and uniform progress in the English language. The sonorous, but cumbrous English of Milton had been greatly improved by Dryden; and we have seen, also, that the terse and somewhat crude diction of Dryden's earlier works had been polished and rendered more harmonious in his later poems.

This harmony of language seemed to Pope and to his

patrons the chief aim of the poet, and to make it still more tuneful and melodious was the purpose of his life.

BIRTH AND EARLY LIFE.Pope was the son of a respectable linen-draper, who had achieved a competency and retired to enjoy it. The mother of the poet must have been a good one, to have retained the ardent and eulogistic affection of her son to the close of her life, as she did. This attachment is a marked feature in his biography, and at last finds vent in her epitaph, in which he calls her "mater optima, mulierum amantissima.”

Pope was a sickly, dwarfed, precocious child. His early studies in Latin and Greek were conducted by priests of the Roman Catholic Church, to which his parents belonged; but he soon took his education into his own hands. Alone and unaided he pursued his classical studies, and made good progress in French and German.

Of his early rhyming powers he says:

"I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came."

At the age of twelve, he was taken to Will's Coffee-house, to see the great Dryden, upon whom, as a model, he had already determined to fashion himself.

His first efforts were translations. He made English versions of the first book of the Thebais of Statius; several of the stories of Chaucer, and one of Ovid's Epistles, all of which were produced before he was fifteen.

ESSAY ON CRITICISM.-He was not quite twenty-one when he wrote his Essay on Criticism, in which he lays down the canons of just criticism, and the causes which prevent it. In illustration, he attacks the multitude of critics of that day, and is particularly harsh in his handling of a few among them. He gained a name by this excellent poem, but he made many enemies, and among them one John Dennis, whom he had

satirized under the name of Appius. Dennis was his life-long foe.

Perhaps there is no better proof of the lasting and deserved popularity of this Essay, than the numerous quotations from it, not only in works on rhetoric and literary criticism, but in our ordinary intercourse with men. Couplets and lines have become household words wherever the English language is spoken. How often do we hear the sciolist condemned in these words:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or touch not the Pierian spring?

Irreverence and rash speculation are satirized thus:

Nay, fly to altars; there they 'll talk you dead,

For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

We may waive a special notice of his Pastorals, which, like those of Dryden, are but clever imitations of Theocritus and anachronisms of the Alexandrian period. Of their merits, we may judge from his own words. "If they have any merit, it is to be attributed to some good old authors, whose works as I had leisure to study, so I hope I have not wanted care to imitate."

RAPE OF THE LOCK. The poem which displays most originality of invention is the Rape of the Lock. It is, perhaps, the best and most charming specimen of the mockheroic to be found in English; and it is specially deserving of attention, because it depicts the social life of the period. in one of its principal phases. Miss Arabella Fermor, one of the reigning beauties of London society, while on a pleasure party on the Thames, had a lock of her hair surreptitiously cut off by Lord Petre. Although it was designed as a joke, the belle was very angry; and Pope, who was a friend of both persons, wrote this poem to assuage her wrath and to reconcile them. It has all the system and construction of an epic.

The poet describes, with becoming delicacy, the toilet of the lady, at which she is attended by obsequious sylphs.

The party embark upon the river, and the fair lady is described in the splendor of her charms:

This nymph, to the destruction of mankind,
Nourished two locks, which graceful hung behind
In equal curls, and well conspired to deck,
With shining ringlets, the smooth, ivory neck.

Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare,

And beauty draws us by a single hair.

Surrounding sylphs protect the beauty; and one to whom the lock has been given in charge, flutters unfortunately too near, and is clipped in two by the scissors that cut the lock. It is a rather extravagant conclusion, even in a mock-heroic poem, that when the strife was greatest to restore the lock, it flew upward:

A sudden star, it shot through liquid air,
And drew behind a radiant trail of hair,

and thus, and always, it

Adds new glory to the shining sphere.

With these simple and meagre materials, Pope has constructed an harmonious poem in which the sylphs, gnomes, and other sprites of the Rosicrucian philosophy find appropriate place and service. It failed in its principal purpose of reconciliation, but it has given us the best mock-heroic poem in the language. As might have been expected, it called forth bitter criticisms from Dennis; and there were not wanting those who saw in it a political significance. Pope's pleasantry was aroused at this, and he published A Key to the Lock, in which he further mystifies these sage readers: Belinda becomes Great Britain; the Baron is the Earl of Oxford; and Thalestris is the Duchess of Marlborough.

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