The Project Gutenberg EBook of History of English Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3), by Hippolyte Taine This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: History of English Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) Author: Hippolyte Taine Commentator: J. Scott Clark Translator: Henry Van Laun Release Date: February 25, 2020 [EBook #61510] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH LITERATURE *** Produced by Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature (Images generously made available by The Internet Archive.) #THE WORLD'S# GREAT CLASSICS LIBRARY COMMITTEE TIMOTHY DWIGHT, D.D. LLD. RICHARD HENRY STODDARD ARTHUR RICHMOND MARSH. A.B. PAUL VAN DYKE, D.D. ALBERT ELLERY BERGH •ILLUSTRATED•WITH•NEARLY•TWO• •HUNDRED•PHOTOGRAVURES•ETCHINGS• •COLORED•PLATES•AND•FULL• •PAGE•PORTRAITS•OF•GREAT•AUTHORS• CLARENCE COOK—ART EDITOR •THE•COLONIAL•PRESS• •NEW•YORK•MDCCCXCIX• ROBERT BURNS HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY HENRY VAN LAUN WITH A SPECIAL INTRODUCTION BY J. SCOTT CLARK, A. M. PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY REVISED EDITION VOLUME III CONTENTS BOOK III.—THE CLASSIC AGE (Continued) CHAPTER SEVENTH The Poets Section I.—The Domination of the Classical Spirit Section II.—Alexander Pope.—His Education and Mode of Life Section III.—Eloisa to Abelard.—The Rape of the Lock.—The Dunciad Section IV.—Pope's Descriptive Talent.—His Didactic Poems Section V.—The Poets Prior, Gay, and Thomson Section VI.—The Beginnings of the Modern Age BOOK IV.—MODERN LIFE CHAPTER FIRST Ideas and Productions Section I.—Rise of Democracy Section II.—Robert Burns Section III.—Conservative rule in England.—Cowper's Poetry Section IV.—The Romantic School Section V.—Philosophy Enters into Literature.—Wordsworth.—Shelley CHAPTER SECOND Lord Byron Section I.—His Life and Character Section II.—The Style of Byron's Poetry Section III.—Byron's Short Poems Section IV.—Manfred Section V.—What Byron's Contemporaries Thought of Him.—His Morals Section VI.—The Malady of the Age CHAPTER THIRD The Past and Present Part I.—The Past Section I.—The Saxon Invasion—The Norman Conquest Section II.—Formative Periods Section III.—The Broadening of Ideas Part II.—The Present Section I.—Effects of the Saxon Invasion and the Norman Conquest Section II.—English Commerce and Industry Section III.—Agriculture Section IV.—English Society.—Philosophy.—Religion Section V.—What Forces Have Produced the Present Civilization 3 5 10 19 28 34 43 48 65 72 87 102 110 117 125 134 148 151 153 157 159 165 170 175 180 BOOK V.—MODERN AUTHORS Introductory Note CHAPTER FIRST The Novel.—Dickens Part I.—The Author Section I.—Importance of the Imaginative Faculty Section II.—Boldness of Dickens's Imagination Section III.—His Trivialities.—His Minuteness Section IV.—His Emotions.—His Pathos.—His Humor Part II.—The Public Section I.—The Morality of English Novels Part III.—The Characters Section I.—Dickens's Love for Natural Characters Section II.—The Hypocrite.—The Positive Man.—The Proud Man Section III.—Children Section IV.—The Ideal Man CHAPTER SECOND The Novel (Continued)—Thackeray Comparison between Dickens and Thackeray Part I.—The Satirist Section I.—The English Satirist Section II.—The English Temperament Section III.—Superiority of Thackeray as a Satirist.—Literary Snobs Section IV.—Resemblance of Thackeray to Swift Section V.—Thackeray's Misanthropy Section VI.—His Characters Part II.—The Artist Section I.—The Art of Thackeray Section II.—Portrait of Henry Esmond.—Historical Talent Section III.—Literature the Definition of Man CHAPTER THIRD Criticism and History—Macaulay Section I.—His Position in England Section II.—Essays Section III.—His Critical Method Section IV.—His Love of Political Liberty Section V.—Characteristics of Macaulay's Style Section VI.—His Rudeness and Humor Section VII.—Estimate of Macaulay's Work Section VIII.—Comparison of Macaulay with French Historians CHAPTER FOURTH Philosophy and History—Carlyle Part I.—Style and Mind Section I.—Carlyle's Obscurity and Crudeness 185 187 189 189 197 200 206 212 213 218 221 223 224 229 231 237 239 241 251 258 265 267 268 271 275 278 287 292 305 308 312 Section II.—The Humor of Carlyle Section III.—Perception of the Real and the Sublime Section IV.—His Passion for Actuality Section V.—His Mode of Thought Part II.—Vocation Section I.—The Appearance and Development of Original Minds Section II.—Characteristics of the German Form of Mind Section III.—German Aptitude for General Ideas Section IV.—Faults of the German Form of Thought Section V.—How Ideas are Reshaped Section VI.—Growth of German Ideas in England Part III.—Philosophy, Morality, and Criticism Section I.—Carlyle's Metaphysics Section II.—His Transposition of German Metaphysics into English Puritanism Section III.—Conception of God and Duty Section IV.—Conception of Christianity Section V.—Carlyle's Criticism Section VI.—The Future of Criticism Part IV.—Conception of History Section I.—Great Men Section II.—Wherein Carlyle is Original Section III.—In what Genuine History Consists Section IV.—Carlyle's History of Cromwell Section V.—His History of the French Revolution Section VI.—His Opinion of Modern England Section VII.—The Dangers of Enthusiasm.—Comparison of Carlyle and Macaulay CHAPTER FIFTH Philosophy—Stuart Mill Section I.—Lack of General Ideas Section II.—Why Metaphysics are Lacking Section III.—Mill's Philosophical Method Part I.—Experience Section I—The Object of Logic Section II.—Discussion of Ideas Section III.—The Two Corner-stones of Logic Section IV.—Theory of Definitions Section V.—Theory of Proof Section VI.—Theory of Axioms Section VII.—Theory of Induction Section VIII.—Applications of the Theory of Induction Section IX.—The Province and Method of Deduction Section X.—Comparison of the Methods of Induction and Deduction Section XI.—Limits of Our Knowledge Part II.—Abstraction Section I.—Agreement of this Philosophy with the English Mind Section II.—The Nature of Abstraction Section III.—Definitions Explain the Abstract Generating Elements of Things Section IV.—The Basis of Proof in Syllogism is an Abstract Law Section V.—Axioms are Relations between Abstract Truths Section VI.—The Methods of Induction Section VII.—Experience and Abstraction Section VIII.—Idea and Limits of Metaphysics 312 319 319 324 328 329 331 332 333 334 336 339 340 341 344 347 348 349 350 351 354 356 358 360 361 362 364 365 368 369 372 375 378 383 387 388 390 394 395 397 399 400 402 403 405 408 Section IX.—A Morning in Oxford CHAPTER SIXTH Poetry—Tennyson Section I.—His Talent and Work Section II.—Portraits of Women Section III.—Wherein Tennyson is at One with Nature Section IV.—In Memoriam.—The Princess Section V.—The Idylls of the King Section VI.—Comparison of English and French Society INDEX ILLUSTRATIONS ROBERT BURNS Photogravure from a painting THE CASTLE OF CHILLON Photogravure from an etching PAGE FROM THE LETTERS OF ST. JEROME Fac-simile example of Printing and Engraving in the Fifteenth Century PAGE FROM THE PRAYER-BOOK OF JUANA OF CASTILE Fac-simile example of Book Illumination in the Sixteenth Century CHRIST CROWNED WITH THORNS Fac-simile example of Printing and Engraving in the Sixteenth Century BOOK III.—THE CLASSIC AGE (Continued) HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPTER SEVENTH The Poets Section I—The Domination of the Classical Spirit When we take in at one view the vast literary region in England, extending from the restoration of the Stuarts to the French Revolution, we perceive that all the productions, independently of the English character, bear a classical impress, and that this impress, special to this region, is met with neither in the preceding nor in the succeeding time. This dominant form of thought is imposed on all writers from Waller to Johnson, from Hobbes and Temple to Robertson and Hume: there is an art to which they all aspire; the work of a hundred and fifty years, practice and theory, inventions and imitations, examples and criticism, are employed in attaining it. They comprehend only one kind of beauty; they establish only the precepts which may produce it; they rewrite, translate, and disfigure on its pattern the great works of other ages; they carry it into all the different kinds of literature, and succeed or fail in them according as it is adapted to them or not. The sway of this style is so absolute that it is imposed on the greatest, and condemns them to impotence when they would apply it beyond its domain. The possession of this style is so universal that it is met with in the weakest authors, and raises them to the height of talent when they apply it in its domain.[1] This it is which brings to perfection prose, discourse, essay, dissertation, narration, and all the productions which form part of conversation and eloquence. This it is which destroyed the old drama, debased the new, impoverished and diverted poetry, produced a correct, agreeable, sensible, colorless, and narrow-minded history. This spirit, common to England and France, impressed its form on an infinite diversity of literary works, so that in its universal manifest ascendancy we cannot but recognize the presence of one of those internal forces which bend and govern the course of human genius. In no branch was it displayed more manifestly than in poetry, and at no time did it appear more clearly than in the reign of Queen Anne. The poets have just attained to the art which they had before dimly discerned. For sixty years they were approaching it; now they possess it, handle it; they use and exaggerate it. The style is at the same time finished and artificial. Let us open the first that comes to hand, Parnell or Philips, Addison or Prior, Gay or Tickell, we find a certain turn of mind, versification, language. Let us pass to a second, the same form reappears; we might say that they are 408 410 411 414 419 425 430 Frontispiece 120 222 290 350 [Pg 3] imitations of one another. Let us go on to a third; the same diction, the same apostrophes, the same fashion of arranging an epithet and rounding a period. Let us turn over the whole lot; with little individual differences, they seem to be all cast in the same mould; one is more epicurean, another more moral, another more biting; but a noble language, an oratorical pomp, a classical correctness, reign throughout; the substantive is accompanied by its adjective, its knight of honor; antithesis balances its symmetrical architecture; the verb, as in Lucan or Statius, is displayed, flanked on each side by a noun decorated by an epithet; we would say that it is of a uniform make, as if fabricated by a machine; we forget what it wishes to make known; we are tempted to count the measure on our fingers; we know beforehand what poetical ornaments are to embellish it. There is a theatrical dressing, contrasts, allusions, mythological elegance, Greek or Latin quotations. There is a scholastic solidity, sententious maxims, philosophic commonplaces, moral developments, oratorical exactness. We might imagine ourselves to be before a family of plants; if the size, color, accessories, names differ, the fundamental type does not vary; the stamens are of the same number, similarly inserted around similar pistils, above leaves arranged on the same plan: a man who knows one knows all; there is a common organism and structure which involves the uniformity of the rest. If we review the whole family we will doubtless find there some characteristic plant which displays the type in a clear light, whilst all around it and by degrees it alters, degenerates, and at last loses itself in the surrounding families. So here we see classical art find its centre in the neighbors of Pope, and above all in Pope himself, then, after being half effaced, mingle with foreign elements until it disappears in the poetry which succeeded it.[2] Section II.—Alexander Pope.—His Education and Mode of Life In 1688, at a linen draper's in Lombard Street, London, was born a little, delicate, and sickly creature, by nature artificial, constituted beforehand for a studious existence, having no taste but for books, who from his early youth derived his whole pleasure from the contemplation of printed books. He copied the letters, and thus learned to write. He passed his infancy with them, and was a verse-maker as soon as he knew how to speak. At the age of twelve he had written a little tragedy out of the Iliad, and an "Ode on Solitude." From thirteen to fifteen he composed a long epic of four thousand verses, called "Alcander." For eight years shut up in a little house in Windsor Forest, he read all the best critics, almost all the English, Latin, and French poets who had a reputation, Homer, the Greek poets, and a few of the great ones in the original, Tasso and Ariosto in translations, with such assiduity that he nearly died from it. He did not search in them for passions, but style: there was never a more devoted adorer, never a more precocious master of form. Already his taste showed itself: amongst all the English poets his favorite was Dryden, the least inspired and the most classical. He perceived his career. He states that Mr. Walsh told him there was one way left of excelling. "We have several great poets," he said, "but we never had one great poet that was correct; and he advised me to make that my study and aim."[3] He followed this advice, tried his hand in translations of Ovid and Statius, and in recasting parts of old Chaucer. He appropriated all the poetic elegances and excellences, stored them up in his memory; he arranged in his head a complete dictionary of all happy epithets, all ingenious turns of expression, all sonorous rhythms by which a poet may exalt, render precise, illuminate an idea. He was like those little musicians, infant prodigies, who, brought up at the piano, suddenly acquire a marvellous touch, roll out scales, brilliant shakes, make the octaves vault with an agility and accuracy which drive off the stage the most famous performers. At seventeen, becoming acquainted with old Wycherley, who was sixty-nine, he undertook, at his request, to correct his poems, corrected them so well that the other was at once charmed and mortified. Pope blotted out, added, recast, spoke frankly, and eliminated firmly. The author, in spite of himself, admired the corrections secretly, and tried openly to make light of them, until at last his vanity, wounded at owing so much to so young a man, and at finding a master in a scholar, ended by breaking off an intercourse by which he profited and suffered too much. For the scholar had at the outset carried the art beyond any of the masters. At sixteen[4] his Pastorals bore witness to a correctness which no one had possessed, not even Dryden. When people observed these choice words, these exquisite arrangements of melodious syllables, this science of division and rejection, this style so fluent and pure, these graceful images rendered still more graceful by the diction, and all this artificial and many-tinted garland of flowers which Pope called pastoral, they thought of the first eclogues of Vergil. Mr. Walsh declared "that it is not flattery at all to say that Vergil had written nothing so good at his age."[5] When later they appeared in a volume, the public was dazzled. "You have only displeased the critics," wrote Wycherley, "by pleasing them too well."[6] The same year the poet of twenty-one finished his "Essay on Criticism," a sort of "Ars Poetica"; it is the kind of a poem a man might write at the end of his career, when he has handled all modes of writing and has grown gray in criticism; and in this subject, of which the treatment demands the experience of a whole literary life, he was at the first onset as ripe as Boileau. What will this consummate musician, who begins by a treatise on harmony, make of his incomparable mechanism and his science as a teacher? It is well to feel and think before, writing: a full source of living ideas and real passions is necessary to make a genuine poet, and in him, seen closely, we find that everything, to his very person, is scanty and artificial; he was a dwarf, four feet high, contorted, hunchbacked, thin, valetudinarian, appearing, when he arrived at maturity, no longer capable of existing. He could not get up himself, a woman dressed him; he wore three pairs of stockings, drawn on one over the other, so slender were his legs; "when he rose, he was invested in bodices made of stiff canvas, being scarce able to hold himself erect till they were laced, and he then put on a flannel waistcoat;"[7] next came a sort of fur doublet, for the least thing made him shiver; and lastly, a thick linen shirt, very warm, with fine sleeves. Over all this he wore a black garment, a tye-wig, a little sword; thus equipped, he went and took his place at the table of his great friend, the Earl of Oxford. He was so small that he had to be raised on a chair of his own; so bald [Pg 4] [Pg 5] [Pg 6] that when he had no company he covered his head with a velvet cap; so punctilious and exacting that the footman evaded going his errands, and the Earl had to discharge several "for their resolute refusal of his messages." At dinner he ate too much; like a spoiled child, he would have highly seasoned dishes, and thus "would oppress his stomach with repletion." When cordials were offered him, he got angry, but did not refuse them. He had all the appetite and whims of an old child, an old invalid, an old author, an old bachelor. We are prepared to find him whimsical and susceptible. He often, without saying a word, and without any known cause, quitted the house of Lord Oxford, and the footman had to go repeatedly with messages to bring him back. If Lady Mary Wortley, his former poetical divinity, were unfortunately at table, there was no dining in peace; they would not fail to contradict, peck at each other, quarrel; and one or other would leave the room. He would be sent for and would return, but he brought his hobbies back with him. He was as crafty and malignant as a nervous abortion, which he was; when he wanted anything, he dared not ask for it plainly; with hints and contrivances of speech he induced people to mention it, to bring it forward, after which he would make use of it. "Thus he teased Lord Orrery till he obtained a screen. He hardly drank tea without a stratagem. Lady Bolingbroke used to say that 'he played the politician about cabbages and turnips.'"[8] The rest of his life is not much more noble. He wrote libels on the Duke of Chandos, Aaron Hill, Lady Mary Wortley, and then lied or equivocated to disavow them. He had an ugly liking for artifice, and played a disloyal trick on Lord Bolingbroke, his greatest friend. He was never frank, always acting a part; he aped the blasé man, the impartial great artist, a contemner of the great, of kings, of poetry itself. The truth is, that he thought of nothing but his phrases, his author's reputation, and "a little regard shown him by the Prince of Wales melted his obduracy."[9] When we read his correspondence, we find that there are not more than about ten genuine letters; he is a literary man even in the moments when he opened his heart; his confidences are formal rhetoric; and when he conversed with a friend he was always thinking of the printer, who would give his effusions to the public. Through this very pretentiousness he grew awkward, and unmasked himself. One day Richardson and his father, the painter, found him reading a pamphlet that Cibber had written against him. "These things," said Pope, "are my diversion. They sat by him while he perused it, and saw his features writhing with anguish; and young Richardson said to his father, when they returned, that he hoped to be preserved from such diversion."[10] After all, his great cause for writing was literary vanity: he wished to be admired, and nothing more; his life was that of a coquette studying herself in a glass, painting her face, smirking, receiving compliments from anyone, yet declaring that compliments weary her, that paint makes her dirty, and that she has a horror of affectation. Pope has no dash, no naturalness or manliness; he has no more ideas than passions; at least such ideas as a man feels it necessary to write, and in connection with which we lose thought of words. Religious controversy and party quarrels resound about him; he studiously avoids them; amidst all these shocks his chief care is to preserve his writing-desk; he is a very lukewarm Catholic, all but a deist, not well aware of what deism means; and on this point he borrows from Bolingbroke ideas whose scope he cannot see, but which he thinks suitable to be put into verse. In a letter to Atterbury (1717) he says: "In my politics, I think no further than how to prefer the peace of my life, in any government under which I live; nor in my religion, than to preserve the peace of my conscience in any church with which I communicate. I hope, all churches and governments are so far of God, as they are rightly understood and rightly administered; and where they err, or may be wrong, I leave it to God alone to mend or reform them."[11] Such convictions do not torment a man. In reality, he did not write because he thought, but thought in order to write; manuscript and the noise it makes in the world, when printed, was his idol; if he wrote verses, it was merely for the sake of doing so. This is the best training for versification. Pope gave himself up to it; he was a man of leisure, his father had left him a very fair fortune; he earned a large sum by translating the Iliad and Odyssey; he had an income of eight hundred pounds. He was never in the pay of a publisher; he looked from an eminence upon the beggarly authors grovelling in their free and easy life, and, calmly seated in his pretty house at Twickenham, in his grotto, or in the fine garden which he had himself planned, he could polish and file his writings as long as he chose. He did not fail to do so. When he had written a work he kept it at least two years in his desk. From time to time he re-read and corrected it; took counsel of his friends, then of his enemies; no new edition was unamended; he altered without wearying. His first outburst became so recast and transformed that it could not be recognized in the final copy. The pieces which seem least retouched are two satires, and Dodsley says that in the manuscript "almost every line was written twice over; I gave him a clean transcript, which he sent some time afterwards to me for the press, with almost every line written twice over a second time."[12] Dr. Johnson says: "From his attention to poetry he was never diverted. If conversation offered anything that could be improved, he committed it to paper; if a thought, or perhaps an expression, more happy than was common, rose to his mind, he was careful to write it; an independent distich was preserved for an opportunity of insertion; and some little fragments have been found containing lines, or parts of lines, to be wrought upon at some other time."[13] His writing- desk had to be placed upon his bed before he rose. "Lord Oxford's domestic related that, in the dreadful winter of 1740, she was called from her bed by him four times in one night to supply him with paper, lest he should lose a thought."[14] Swift complains that he was never at leisure for conversation, because he "had always some poetical scheme in his head." Thus nothing was lacking for the attainment of perfect expression; the practice of a lifetime, the study of every model, an independent fortune, the company of men of the world, an immunity from turbulent passions, the absence of dominant ideas, the facility of an infant prodigy, the assiduity of an old man of letters. It seems as though he were expressly endowed with faults and good qualities, here enriched, there impoverished, at once narrowed and developed, to set in relief the classical form by the diminution of the classical depth, to present the public with a model of a worn-out and accomplished art, to reduce to a brilliant and rigid crystal the flowing sap of an expiring literature. [Pg 7] [Pg 8] [Pg 9] Section III.—Eloisa to Abelard.—The Rape of the Lock.—The Dunciad It is a great misfortune for a poet to know his business too well; his poetry then shows the man of business, and not the poet. I wish I could admire Pope's works of imagination, but I cannot. In vain I read the testimony of his contemporaries, and even that of the moderns, and repeat to myself that in his time he was the prince of poets; that his epistle from "Eloisa to Abelard" was received with a cry of enthusiasm; that a man could not then imagine a finer expression of true passion; that to this very day it is learned by heart, like the speech of Hippolyte in the "Phèdre" of Racine; that Johnson, the great literary critic, ranked it amongst "the happiest productions of the human mind"; that Lord Byron himself preferred it to the celebrated ode of Sappho. I read it again and am bored; this is not as it ought to be; but, in spite of myself, I yawn, and I open the original letters of Eloisa to find the cause of my weariness. Doubtless poor Eloisa is a barbarian, nay worse, a literary barbarian; she puts down learned quotations, arguments, tries to imitate Cicero, to arrange her periods; she could not do otherwise, writing a dead language, with an acquired style; perhaps the reader would do as much if he were obliged to write to his mistress in Latin.[15] But how does true feeling pierce through the scholastic form! "Thou art the only one who can sadden me, console me, make me joyful.... I should be happier and prouder to be called thy mistress than to be the lawful wife of an emperor.... Never, God knows, have I wished for anything else in thee but thee. It is thee alone whom I desire; nothing that thou couldst give; not marriage, not dowry: I never dreamt of doing my own pleasure or my own will, thou knowest it, but thine." Then come passionate words, genuine love words,[16] then the unrestrained words of a penitent, who says and dares everything, because she wishes to be cured, to show her wound to her confessor, even her most shameful wound; perhaps also because in extreme agony, as in child-birth, modesty vanishes. All this is very crude, very rude; Pope has more wit than she, and how he endues her with it! In his hands she becomes an academician, and her letter is a repertory of literary effects; portraits and descriptions; she paints to Abelard the nunnery and the landscape: "In these lone walls (their days eternal bound), These moss-grown domes with spiry turrets crowned, Where awful arches make a noon-day night, And the dim windows shed a solemn light.... The wandering streams that shine between the hills, The grots that echo to the tinkling rills, The dying gales that pant upon the trees, The lakes that quiver to the curling breeze."[17] Declamation and commonplace: she sends Abelard discourses on love and the liberty which it demands, on the cloister and the peaceful life which it affords, on writing and the advantages of the post.[18] Antitheses and contrasts, she forwards them to Abelard by the dozen; a contrast between the convent illuminated by his presence and desolate by his absence, between the tranquillity of the pure nun and the anxiety of the sinful nun, between the dream of human happiness and the dream of divine happiness. In fine, it is a bravura, with contrasts of forte and piano, variations and change of key. Eloisa makes the most of her theme, and sets herself to crowd into it all the powers and effects of her voice. Admire the crescendo, the shakes by which she ends her brilliant morceaux; to transport the hearer at the close of the portrait of the innocent nun, she says: "How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot: Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each prayer accepted and each wish resigned; Labour and rest, that equal periods keep; 'Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;' Desires composed, affections ever even; Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to heav'n. Grace shines around her with serenest beams, And whisp'ring angels prompt her golden dreams. For her, th' unfading rose of Eden blooms, And wings of seraphs shed divine perfumes, For her the spouse prepares the bridal ring, For her white virgins hymeneals sing, To sounds of heavenly harps she dies away, And melts in visions of eternal day."[19] Observe the noise of the big drum; I mean the grand contrivances, for so may be called all that a person says who wishes to rave and cannot; for instance, speaking to rocks and walls, praying the absent Abelard to come, fancying him present, apostrophizing grace and virtue: "O grace serene! O virtue heavenly fair! Divine oblivion of low-thoughted care! Fresh-blooming hope, gay daughter of the sky! And faith, our early immortality! Enter, each mild, each amicable guest; [Pg 10] [Pg 11] [Pg 12] Receive, and wrap me in eternal rest!"[20] Hearing the dead speaking to her, telling the angels: "I come! I come! Prepare your roseate bow'rs, Celestial palms, and ever-blooming flow'rs."[21] This is the final symphony with modulations of the celestial organ. I presume that Abelard cried "Bravo" when he heard it. But this is nothing in comparison with the art exhibited by her in every phrase. She puts ornaments into every line. Imagine an Italian singer trilling every word. O what pretty sounds! how nimbly and brilliantly they roll along, how clear, and always exquisite! it is impossible to reproduce them in another tongue. Now it is a happy image, filling up a whole phrase; now a series of verses, full of symmetrical contrasts; two ordinary words set in relief by strange conjunction; an imitative rhythm completing the impression of the mind by the emotion of the senses; the most elegant comparisons and the most picturesque epithets; the closest style and the most ornate. Except truth, nothing is wanting. Eloisa is worse than a singer, she is an author: we look at the back of her epistle to Abelard to see if she has not written on it "For Press." Pope has somewhere given a receipt for making an epic poem: take a storm, a dream, five or six battles, three sacrifices, funeral games, a dozen gods in two divisions; shake together until there rises the froth of a lofty style. We have just seen the receipt for making a love-letter. This kind of poetry resembles cookery; neither heart nor genius is necessary to produce it, but a light hand, an attentive eye, and a cultivated taste. It seems that this kind of talent is made for light verses. It is factitious, and so are the manners of society. To make pretty speeches, to prattle with ladies, to speak elegantly of their chocolate or their fan, to jeer at fools, to criticise the last tragedy, to be good at insipid compliments or epigrams—this, it seems, is the natural employment of a mind such as this, but slightly impassioned, very vain, a perfect master of style, as careful of his verses as a dandy of his coat. Pope wrote the "Rape of the Lock" and the "Dunciad"; his contemporaries went into ecstasies about the charm of his badinage and the precision of his raillery, and believed that he had surpassed Boileau's "Lutrin" and "Satires." That may well be; at all events the praise would be scanty. In Boileau there are, as a rule, two kinds of verse, as was said by a man of wit;[22] most of which seem to be those of a sharp schoolboy in the third class, the rest those of a good schoolboy in the upper division. Boileau wrote the second verse before the first: this is why once out of four times his first verse only serves to stop a gap. Doubtless Pope had a more brilliant and adroit mechanism; but this faculty of hand does not suffice to make a poet, even a poet of the boudoir. There, as elsewhere, we need genuine passion, or at least genuine taste. When we wish to paint the pretty nothings of conversation and the world, we must at least like them. We can only paint well what we love.[23] Is there no charming grace in the prattle and frivolity of a pretty woman? Painters, like Watteau, have spent their lives in feasting on them. A lock of hair raised by the wind, a pretty arm peeping from underneath a great deal of lace, a stooping figure making the bright folds of a petticoat sparkle, and the arch half- engaging, half-mocking smile of the pouting mouth—these are enough to transport an artist. Certainly he will be aware of the influence of the toilet, as much so as the lady herself, and will never scold her for passing three hours at her glass; there is poetry in elegance. He enjoys it as a picture; delights in the refinements of worldly life, the grand quiet lines of the lofty, wainscoted drawing-room, the soft reflection of the high mirrors and glittering porcelain, the careless gayety of the little sculptured Loves, locked in embrace above the mantelpiece, the silvery sound of these soft voices, buzzing scandal round the tea-table. Pope hardly if at all rejoices in them; he is satirical and English amidst this amiable luxury, introduced from France. Although he is the most worldly of English poets, he is not enough so: nor is the society around him. Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who was in her time "the pink of fashion" and who is compared to Mme de Sévigné, has such a serious mind, such a decided style, such a precise judgment, and such a harsh sarcasm, that we would take her for a man. In reality the English, even Lord Chesterfield and Horace Walpole, never mastered the true tone of the salon. Pope is like them; his voice is out of tune, and then suddenly becomes biting. Every instant a harsh mockery blots out the graceful images which he began to awaken. Consider "The Rape of the Lock" as a whole; it is a buffoonery in a noble style. Lord Petre had cut off a lock of hair of a fashionable beauty, Mrs. Arabella Fermor; out of this trifle the problem is to make an epic, with invocations, apostrophes, the interventions of supernatural beings, and the rest of poetic mechanism; the solemnity of style contrasts with the littleness of the events; we laugh at these bickerings as at insects quarrelling. Such has always been the case in England; whenever Englishmen wish to represent social life, it is with a superficial and assumed politeness; at the bottom of their admiration there is scorn. Their insipid compliments conceal a mental reservation; let us observe them well, and we will see that they look upon a pretty, well-dressed, and coquettish woman as a pink doll, fit to amuse people for half an hour by her outward show. Pope dedicates his poem to Mrs. Arabella Fermor with every kind of compliment. The truth is, he is not polite; a Frenchwoman would have sent him back his book, and advised him to learn manners; for one commendation of her beauty she would find ten sarcasms upon her frivolity. Is it very pleasant to have it said: "You have the prettiest eyes in the world, but you live in the pursuit of trifles"? Yet to this all his homage is reduced.[24] His complimentary emphasis, his declaration that the "ravish'd hair... adds new glory to the shining sphere,"[25] all his stock of phrases is but a parade of gallantry which betrays indelicacy and coarseness. Will she "Stain her honor, or her new brocade, [Pg 13] [Pg 14] [Pg 15] Forget her pray'rs or miss a masquerade, Or lose her heart, or necklace at a ball?"[26] No Frenchman of the eighteenth century would have imagined such a compliment. At most, that bearish Rousseau, that former lackey and Geneva moralist, might have delivered this disagreeable thrust. In England it was not found too rude. Mrs. Arabella Fermor was so pleased with the poem that she gave away copies of it. Clearly she was not hard to please, for she had heard much worse compliments. If we read in Swift the literal transcript of a fashionable conversation, we shall see that a woman of fashion of that time could endure much before she was angry. But the strangest thing is, that this trifling is, for Frenchmen, at least, no badinage at all. It is not at all like lightness or gayety. Dorat, Gresset, would have been stupefied and shocked by it. We remain cold under its most brilliant hits. Now and then at most a crack of the whip arouses us, but not to laughter. These caricatures seem strange to us, but do not amuse. The wit is no wit: all is calculated, combined, artificially prepared; we expect flashes of lightning, but at the last moment they do not descend. Thus Lord Petre, to "implore propitious heaven, and every power," "To Love an altar built Of twelve vast French romances, neatly gilt. There lay three garters, half a pair of gloves, And all the trophies of his former loves; With tender billets-doux he lights the pyre, And breathes three am'rous sighs to raise the fire."[27] We remain disappointed, not seeing the comicality of the description. We go on conscientiously, and in the picture of Melancholy and her palace find figures much stranger: "Here sighs a jar, and there a goose-pye talks; Men proved with child, as pow'rful fancy works, And maids turned bottles, call aloud for corks."[28] We say to ourselves now that we are in China: that so far from Paris and Voltaire we must be surprised at nothing, that these folk have ears different from ours, and that a Pekin mandarin vastly relishes kettle-music. Finally, we comprehend that, even in this correct age and this artificial poetry, the old style of imagination exists; that it is nourished as before, by oddities and contrasts; and that taste, in spite of all culture, will never become acclimatized; that incongruities, far from shocking, delight it; that it is insensible to French sweetness and refinements; that it needs a succession of expressive figures, unexpected and grinning, to pass before it; that it prefers this coarse carnival to delicate insinuations; that Pope belongs to his country, in spite of his classical polish and his studied elegances, and that his unpleasant and vigorous fancy is akin to that of Swift. We are now prepared and can enter upon his second poem, "The Dunciad." We need much self-command not to throw down this masterpiece as insipid, and even disgusting. Rarely has so much talent been spent to produce greater tedium. Pope wished to be avenged on his literary enemies, and sang of Dulness, the sublime goddess of literature, "daughter of Chaos and eternal Night,... gross as her sire, and as her mother grave,"[29] queen of hungry authors, who chooses for her son and favorite, first Theobald and afterwards Cibber. There he is, a king, and to celebrate his accession she institutes public games in imitation of the ancients; first a race of booksellers, trying to seize a poet; then the struggle of the authors, who first vie with each other in braying, and then dash into the Fleet-ditch filth; then the strife of critics, who have to undergo the reading of two voluminous authors, without falling asleep.[30] Strange parodies, to be sure, and, in truth, not very striking. Who is not deafened by these hackneyed and bald allegories, Dulness, poppies, mists, and Sleep? What if I entered into details, and described the poetess offered for a prize, "with cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes"; if I related the plunges of the authors, the floundering in the Fleet-ditch, the vilest sewer in the town; if I transcribed all the extraordinary verses in which "First he relates, how sinking to the chin, Smit with his mien, the mud-nymphs suck'd him in: How young Lutetia, softer than the down, Nigrina black, and Merdamante brown, Vied for his love in jetty bow'rs below."...[31] I must stop. Swift alone might have seemed capable of writing some passages, for instance, that on the fall of Curll. We might have excused it in Swift; the extremity of despair, the rage of misanthropy, the approach of madness, might have carried him to such excess. But Pope, who lived calm and admired in his villa, and who was only urged by literary rancor! He can have had no nerves! How could a poet have dragged his talent wantonly through such images, and so constrained his ingeniously woven verses to receive such dirt? Picture a pretty drawing-room basket, destined only to contain flowers and fancy work sent down to the kitchen to be turned into a receptacle for filth. In fact, all the filth of literary life is here; and heaven knows what it then was! In no age were hack-writers so beggarly and so vile. Poor fellows, like Richard Savage, who slept during one winter in the open air on the cinders of a glass manufactory, lived on what he received for a dedication, knew the inside of a prison, rarely dined, and drank at the expense of his friends; pamphleteers, like Tutchin, who was soundly whipped; plagiarists, like Ward, exposed in the pillory and pelted with rotten eggs and apples; courtesans, like Eliza Heywood, notorious by the shamelessness of their public confessions; bought journalists, hired slanderers, venders of scandal and insults, half rogues, complete roisterers, and all the literary [Pg 16] [Pg 17] vermin which haunted the gambling-houses, the stews, the gin-cellars, and at a signal from a bookseller, stung honest folk for a crownpiece. These villanies, this foul linen, the greasy coat six years old, the musty pudding, and the rest, are to be found in Pope as in Hogarth, with English coarseness and precision. This is their error, they are realists, even under the classical wig; they do not disguise what is ugly and mean; they describe that ugliness and meanness with their exact outlines and distinguishing marks; they do not clothe them in a fine cloak of general ideas; they do not cover them with the pretty innuendoes of society. This is the reason why their satires are so harsh. Pope does not flog the dunces, he knocks them down; his poem is hard and malicious; it is so much so that it becomes clumsy; to add to the punishment of dunces, he begins at the deluge, writes historical passages, represents at length the past, present, and future empire of Dullness, the library of Alexandria burned by Omar, learning extinguished by the invasion of the barbarians and by the superstition of the Middle Ages, the empire of stupidity which extends over England and will swallow it up. What paving-stones to crush flies! "See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled, Mountains of casuistry heap'd o'er her head! Philosophy, that leaned on Heav'n before, Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more. Physic of Metaphysic begs defence, And Metaphysic calls for aid on sense!... Religion blushing veils her sacred fires, And unawares Morality expires. Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine, Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine! Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored; Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great anarch! lets the curtain fall; And universal darkness buries all."[32] The last scene ends with noise, cymbals and trombones, crackers and fireworks. As for me, I carry away from this celebrated entertainment only the remembrance of a hubbub. Unwittingly I have counted the lights, I know the machinery, I have touched the toilsome stage property of apparitions and allegories. I bid farewell to the scene-painter, the machinist, the manager of literary effects, and go elsewhere to find the poet. Section IV.—Pope's Descriptive Talent.—His Didactic Poems However, a poet exists in Pope, and to discover him we have only to read him by fragments; if the whole is, as a rule, wearisome or shocking, the details are admirable. It is so at the close of every literary age. Pliny the younger, and Seneca, so affected and so stiff, are charming in small bits; each of their phrases, taken by itself, is a masterpiece; each verse in Pope is a masterpiece when taken alone. At this time, and after a hundred years of culture, there is no movement, no object, no action, which poets cannot describe. Every aspect of nature was observed; a sunrise, a landscape reflected in the water,[33] a breeze amid the foliage, and so forth. Ask Pope to paint in verse an eel, a perch, or a trout, he has the exact phrase ready; we might glean from him the contents of a "Gradus." He gives the features so exactly, that at once we think we see the thing; he gives the expression so copiously, that our imagination, however obtuse, will end by seeing it. He marks everything in the flight of a pheasant: "See! from the brake the whirring pheasant springs And mounts exulting on triumphant wings.... Ah! what avail his glossy, varying dyes, His purple crest, and scarlet-circled eyes, The vivid green his shining plumes unfold, His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold?"[34] He possesses the richest store of words to depict the sylphs which flutter round his heroine, Belinda: "But now secure the painted vessel glides, The sunbeams trembling on the floating tides: While melting music steals upon the sky, And softened sounds along the waters die; Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play, The lucid squadrons round the sails repair: Soft o'er the shrouds the aerial whispers breathe, That seemed but zephyrs to the train beneath. Some to the sun their insect-wings unfold, Waft on the breeze, or sink in clouds of gold; Transparent forms, too fine for mortal sight, Their fluid bodies half dissolved in light. Loose to the wind their airy garment flew, Thin glitt'ring textures of the filmy dew, [Pg 18] [Pg 19] Dipped in the richest tincture of the skies, Where light disports in ever-mingling dyes; While ev'ry beam new transient colors flings, Colors that change whene'er they wave their wings."[35] Doubtless these are not Shakespeare's sylphs; but side by side with a natural and living rose, we may still look with pleasure on a flower of diamonds, as they come from the hand of the jeweller, a masterpiece of art and patience, whose facets make the light glitter, and cast a shower of sparkles over the filagree foliage in which they are embedded. A score of times in a poem of Pope's we stop to look with wonder on some of these literary adornments. He feels so well in what the strong point of his talent lies, that he abuses it; he delights to show his skill. What can be staler than a card party, or more repellent to poetry than the queen of spades or the king of hearts? Yet, doubtless for a wager, he has recorded in the "Rape of the Lock" a game of ombre; we follow it, hear it, recognize the dresses: "Behold four kings in majesty revered, With hoary whiskers and a forky beard; And four fair queens whose hands sustain a flower, Th' expressive emblem of their softer power; Four knaves in garb succinct, a trusty band; Caps on their heads and halberts in their hand; And parti-coloured troops, a shining train, Drawn forth to combat on the velvet plain."[36] We see the trumps, the cuts, the tricks, and instantly afterwards the coffee, the china, the spoons, the fiery spirits (to wit, spirits of wine); we have here in advance the modes and periphrases of Delille. The celebrated verses in which Delille at once employs and describes imitative harmony are translated from Pope.[37] It is an expiring poetry, but poetry still: an ornament to put on a mantelpiece is an inferior work of art, but still it is a work of art. To descriptive talent Pope unites oratorical talent. This art, proper to the classical age, is the art of expressing ordinary general ideas. For a hundred and fifty years men of both the thinking countries, England and France, employed herein all their study. They seized those universal and limited truths, which, being situated between lofty philosophical abstractions and petty sensible details, are the subject-matter of eloquence and rhetoric, and form what we nowadays call commonplaces. They arranged them in compartments; methodically developed them; made them obvious by grouping and symmetry; disposed them in regular processions, which with dignity and majesty advanced well disciplined, and in a body. The influence of this oratorical reason became so great that it was imposed on poetry itself. Buffon ends by saying, in praise of certain verses, that they are as fine as fine prose. In fact, poetry at this time became a more affected prose subjected to rhyme. It was only a higher kind of conversation and more select discourse. It is powerless when it is necessary to paint or represent an action, when the need is to see and make visible living passions, large genuine emotions, men of flesh and blood; it results only in college epics like the "Henriade," freezing odes and tragedies like those of Voltaire and Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, or those of Addison, Thomson, Dr. Johnson, and the rest. It makes them up of dissertations, because it is capable of nothing else but dissertations. Here henceforth is its domain; and its final task is the didactic poem, which is a dissertation in verse. Pope excelled in it, and his most perfect poems are those made up of precepts and arguments. Artifice in these is less shocking than elsewhere. A poem—I am wrong, essays like his upon "Criticism," on "Man" and the "Government of Providence," on the "Knowledge and Characters of Me...