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IV. Yet even this may not be the worst. Even below this deep perhaps there opens a lower deep. I submit that, when a man is asked for a specimen of the Agincourt French literature, he cannot safely produce a specimen from a literature two hundred and fifty years younger without some risk of facing a writ de lunatico inquirendo. Pompey the Pitiful (or, if the reader is vexed at hearing him so called, let us call him, with Lord Biron, in ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost,’ ‘more than great, great Pompey–Pompey the Huge’) was not published, even in France, until about two centuries and a quarter had elapsed from Agincourt. But, as respects England, eighteen-penny Pompey was not revealed; the fulness of time for his avatar amongst us did not arrive until something like two hundred and sixty years had winged their flight from Agincourt. And yet Pope’s doctrine had been that, in the conquest of France, we English first met with the Prometheus that introduced us to the knowledge of fire and intellectual arts. Is not this ghastly? Elsewhere, indeed, Pope skulks away from his own doctrine, and talks of ‘correctness‘ as the particular grace for which we were indebted to France. But this will not do. In his own ‘Art of Criticism,’ about verse 715, he describes ‘us brave Britons’ as incorrigibly rebellious in that particular. We have no correctness, it seems, nor ever had; and therefore, except upon Sir Richard Blackmore’s principle of stealing a suit of clothes ‘from a naked Pict,’ it is hard to see how we need to thank France for that which, as to us, has no existence. Then, again, Pope acquiesced at other times in an opinion of his early friends, that not Pompey, but himself, was the predestined patriarch of ‘correctness.’ Walsh, who was a sublime old blockhead, suggested to Pope that ‘correctness’ was the only tight-rope upon which a fresh literary performer in England could henceforth dance with any advantage of novelty; all other tight-ropes and slack-ropes of every description having been preoccupied by elder funambulists. Both Walsh and Pope forgot ever once to ask themselves what it was that they meant by ‘correctness;’ an idea that, in its application to France, Akenside afterwards sternly ridiculed. Neither of the two literati stopped to consider whether it was correctness in thought, or metrical correctness, or correctness in syntax and idiom; as to all of which, by comparison with other poets, Pope is conspicuously deficient. But no matter what they meant, or if they meant nothing at all. Unmeaning, or in any case inconsistent, as this talk about ‘correctness’ may be, we cannot allow Pope so to escape from his own hyperbolical absurdities. It was not by a little pruning or weeding that France, according to his original proposition, had bettered our native literature–it was by genial incubation, by acts of vital creation. She, upon our crab-tree cudgel of Agincourt, had engrafted her own peaches and apricots–our sterile thorn France had inoculated with roses. English literature was the Eve that, in the shape of a rib, had been abstracted from the side of the slumbering Pompey–of unconscious Pompey the Huge. And all at the small charge of eighteen-pence! O heavens, to think of that! By any possibility, that the cost, the total ‘damage’ of our English literature should have been eighteen-pence!–that a shilling should actually be coming to us out of half-a-crown!

‘Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem.’

NOTES.

NOTE 1.

A similar instance of a craze beyond the bounds of perfect physical sanity may be found in Dr. Arnold’s nervous paroxysm of horror on hearing St. Paul placed on a level with St. John the Evangelist.

NOTE 2.

And by the way, as to servants, a great man may offend in two ways: either by treating his servants himself superciliously, or secondly, which is quite reconcilable with the most paternal behavior on his own part, by suffering them to treat the public superciliously. Accordingly, all novelists who happen to have no acquaintance with the realities of life as it now exists, especially therefore rustic Scotch novelists, describe the servants of noblemen as ‘insolent and pampered menials.’ But, on the contrary, at no houses whatever are persons of doubtful appearance and anomalous costume, sure of more respectful attention than at those of the great feudal aristocracy. At a merchant’s or a banker’s house, it is odds but the porter or the footman will govern himself in his behavior by his own private construction of the case, which (as to foreigners) is pretty sure to be wrong. But in London, at a nobleman’s door, the servants show, by the readiness of their civilities to all such questionable comers, that they have taken their lessons from a higher source than their own inexperience or unlearned fancies.