FullReads

My last paper on Pope has been taxed with exaggeration. This charge comes from a London weekly journal (The Leader) distinguished by its ability, by its hardihood of speculation, by its comprehensive candor, but, in my eyes, still more advantageously distinguished by its deep sincerity. Such qualities give a special value to the courtesies of that journal; and I in particular, as a literary man, have to thank it for repeated instances of kindness the most indulgent on any occasion which has brought up the mention of my name. Such qualities of necessity give a corresponding value to its censures. And accordingly, as a point of duty, I directed my attention immediately to this censure. Whatever was still unprinted I reviewed; and whatever struck me as open to objection I removed. And if the result after all has been that I do not altogether concur in the criticism of The Leader, the reason is because, as upon re-examination it strikes me, in the worst cases Pope has not left room for exaggeration. I do not see any actual exaggeration, simply because I do not see that any exaggeration is possible. But though I thus found myself unable sincerely to make the sacrifice of my own opinion, another sacrifice of a different kind I have made, viz., that of half my paper. I cancelled one half–viz., that half which was occupied with cases in Pope of disingenuousness, and perhaps of moral falsehood or collusion with other people’s falsehood, but not of falsehood atrociously literal and conscious; meaning thus to diminish by one half the penance of those who do not like to see Pope assaulted, although forced by uneasiness to watch the assault;–feeling with which I heartily sympathize; and meaning, on the other hand, in justification of mylelf, to throw the reader’s attention more effectively, because more exclusively, upon such cases of frantic and moonstruck falsehood as could allow no room for suspense or mitigation of judgment. Of these I have selected two, one relating to the Duke of Buckingham, and the other to the history and derivation of English literature. Generally, I believe, that to a just appreciation of Pope’s falseness, levity, and self-contradiction, it is almost essential that a reader should have studied him with the purpose of becoming his editor. This at one time was my own purpose; and thus it was that I became acquainted with qualities prevailing in Pope which, in the midst of my great admiration for him, would have made such a purpose difficult of execution. For in the relation between author and editor, any harshness of reproach on the part of the latter, or any expression of alienation and imperfect sympathy, seems unbecoming in one who has spontaneously assumed the office of a patronus to a client, and are uniformly painful to the reader. On this account it is that the late Mr. Roscoe figures amongst all editors of Pope as by far the most agreeable. He has a just tenderness for the memory and merits of the great writer whom he undertakes to edit; this feeling keeps his annotations clear from the petulance of Joseph Warton and the malice of Bowles; whilst, not having happened to see Pope’s errors in the same light as myself, he suffers from no conflict between his natural indulgence to intellectual splendor and his conscientious reverence for truth.

But if the reader is shocked with Pope’s false reading of phenomena, where not the circumstances so much as the construction of the circumstances may be challenged, what must he think of those cases in which downright facts, and incidents the most notorious, have been outrageously falsified only in obedience to a vulgar craving for effect in the dramatic situations, or by way of pointing a moral for the stimulation of torpid sensibilities? Take, for instance, the death of the second Villiers, Duke of Buckingham–a story which, in Pope’s version of it, has travelled into a popularity that may be called national; and yet, the whole is one tissue of falsehoods–and of falsehoods that must have been known for such by Pope not less than to most of his contemporary readers. Suppose them not known, and the whole must have wanted all natural interest. For this interest lay in the Duke’s character, in his superb accomplishments and natural advantages, in his fine person, in his vast wealth, and in the admirable versatility of his intellectual powers, which made him alternately the idol and the terror of all circles that he approached, which caused Lord Clarendon to tremble with impotent malice in his chancellor’s robes, and Dry den to shiver with panic under his laureate crowns. Now, wherever these features of the case were not known, the story was no more than any ordinary death arising out of a fox-chase. But those to whom they were known must, at the same time, have known the audacious falsehood which disfigures the story in Pope’s way of telling it. Without the personal interest, the incidents were nothing; and with that interest, at starting, Pope’s romance must have defeated itself by its fabulous coloring. Let me recall to the reader the principal lines in this famous description:–