A BOOK OF THE MOMENT

POPE

[COPYRIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE New York Times.] Pope. The Leslie Stephen Lecture for 1925, by Lytton Strachey. (Cambridge University Press. 2s. net.) A LITERARY lecture on a controversial subject such as Pope should be bold, stimulating, and in the exact sense sensational, and, above all, provocative. Mr. Strachey, owing to his notable power of compression and his fine instinct for selection, is able to cover a very great deal of ground in his lecture ; but naturally, and rightly, it is a piece of special pleading for a special and personal view, and not an attempt to re write Pope's life, to criticize his literary work in detail, or to determine his achievement as a whole. At first he sets Pope the Man before our eyes, and makes us focus our atten- tion upon the malicious side of Pope. That is one half of his lecture. The other half is the most brilliant, satisfying and illuminating analysis of Pope's metrical technique—of his use of the couplet and its influence on him—that I have ever read.

Mr. Lytton Strachey begins with a delightful shiver at the thought of how dreadful it must have been to live in an age like that of Pope. You might wake up one morning to find yourself exposed, both now and for ever, to the ridicule of the polite world, " hanging by the neck, and kicking our legs, on the elegant gibbet that has been put up for us by the little monster of Twit'nam." He goes on to console himself by saying that : " To us, after two centuries, the agonies suffered by the victims of Pope's naughtiness are a matter of indiffer- ence ; the "fate of Pope's own soul leaves us cold. We sit at our ease, reading those Satires and Epistles, in which the verses, when they were written, resembled nothing so much as spoonfuls of boiling oil, ladled out by a fiendish monkey at an upstairs window upon such of the passers-by whom the wretch had a grudge against—and we are delighted. We would not have it otherwise : whatever is, is right."

That is delightful, and said with real charm and real insight. Yet I am sure that Mr. Strachey would admit, when he was not out to make an inspired and inspiring interpretation of a poet by caricature, it is a travesty of the facts.. Pope, no doubt, had in him the elements of the " fiendish monkey at an upstairs window " ; but it was only one side of him. There was as much blazing, resounding, explosive antithesis in his character as there is in his couplets. And here I may note that Mr. Strachey goes on to heighten his picture by a mistake which is often made in regard to the eighteenth century in England, and by those who know that century best in France. Mr. Strachey wonders how it was that when Pope fell upon great lords and ladies, duchesses and statesmen, with his appalling ferocity, and he might well have added malignity, that he did not suffer as Voltaire suffered at that very time on less provocation. To use Mr. Strachey's own words, on the other side of the Channel " the monkey would have been whipped into silence and good manners in double quick time." Here, he considers that " though ' the Great ' were all- powerful, they preferred not to use their power against a libellous rhymer."

I feel convinced that this is a mistake, and that they had not the power that they had in France. That is the occasion of Voltaire's love of England and of his contrasts between the way in which literary genius was regarded and treated in the two countries. The great men and the rich men were powerful in England, the police were very ineffective, and the law was cumbrous ; but, nevertheless, the power of the nobility and• of the officials was very distinctly curbed and circumscribed in England. There was nothing like the kind of " Protection". here which the noblesse and the great officials had in France. There were no kttres de cachet, and the courts were not only able and willing, but rather pleased to catch a Peei or an official and teach him his place. Our judges were paid £5,000 a year—equivalent to nearly £20,000 a year now--they sat for life and, being men of the middle class, they rather liked to display their power and their indifference to rank. Only the other day I was reading an eighteenth-century book, entitled A Picture of England : containing 4 Description of the Laws, Cus- tonis, and Manners of England, by M. d'Archenholz, formerly 'a

Captain in the service of the King of Prussia. This gentleman was delighted with England and its houses and its people.. The one thing he found difficult to understand was why an officer and a gentleman in England was not allowed to beat a" servant or a dependent, or to take the law into his own hands.

He tells us how the day after his arrival in England he very nearly got into trouble by his ignorance of English customs. When he tried to beat a young Jew who, he said, had cheated him, the bystanders " informed me, in the most polite terms, that, according to the laws of that country, no offence whatso- ever could warrant my behaviour." He describes how oddly

the liberty of the subject is preserved—a liberty which, as ' he naively notes, " gives occasion to a thousand extraordinary and singular customs." " The first man in the kingdom is cautious of striking his domestics ; for they not only may defend themselves against him, but also commence an action in a court of justice."

A signal proof that Pope was not primarily a " fiendish monkey " who needed a whipping, is to be found in the' way in which his contemporaries regarded him. If you could call up discerning witnesses when Pope's powers were at their greatest and his popularity at its zenith, and ask them to describe Pope as a poet, they would, I am sure, not speak of him as a satirist, or a master of invective and deadly flouts and jeers. Instead, they would say that

he excelled as a love poet. And they were right.- We are apt to forget what a deal of delicate sex attraction

Pope could pack into his antithetical couplets. Perhaps the most potent evidence is in the exquisite lines to Gay, in which the shadow of the charming Mary Montagu falls across the page

Ah, friend 'tis true—this truth you lovers know—

In vain my structures rise, my gardens grow, In vain fair Thames reflects the double scenes Of hanging mountains and of sloping greens : Joy lives not here—to happier seats it flies, And only dwells where Wortley casts her eyes.

What are the gay parterre, the chequor'd shade,

The morning bower, the evening colonnade—

But soft recesses of uneasy minds, To sigh unheard in, to the passing winds ?

So the struck deer in some sequester'd part Lies down to die, the arrow at his heart, He, stretched unseen in coverts hid from day, Bleeds drop by drop, and pants his life away."

If it is said that any poet when moved by melancholy can write good poems about himself, I would refer to that much neglected but most charming early love poem, " The Epistle of Sappho to Phaon." It is full of lovely verses, and verses often inspired with a romantic touch. Here is a line worthy of Keats :-

"For, oh, how vast a memory has love !"

But best of all is the single line :— " That wand'ring heart which I so lately lost."

But I must not merely protest against Mr. Lytton Strachey forgetting, (though, of course, only while he was lecturing) that Pope was an accomplished love poet as well as a fiendish monkey. He was also, of course, a metaphysical poet of no mean order. I mean by that that he could put argument in verse, and argument on serious subjects, with immense accomplishment. The passage in which towards the end of " The Dunciad " Pope lashes the Broad Churchman of his age is worthy of Dryden at his best :—

" All-seeing in thy mists, we want no guide, Mother of arrogance, and source of pride ! We nobly take the high Priori Road, And reason downward, till we doubt of God Make Nature still encroach upon His plan; And shove Him off as far as e'er we can : Thrust some mechanic cause into His place ; Or bind in matter, or diffuse in spaoe. Or, at one bound o'erleaping all His laws, Make God man's image, man the final cause. Find virtue local, all relation scorn, See all in self, and but for self be born : Of nought so certain as our reason still, Of nought so doubtful as of soul and will. Oh hide the God still more ! and make us see Such as Lucretius drew, a God like thee ; Wrapped up in self, a God without a thought, Regardless of our merit or default."

J. ST. LOE STRACHEY.