BOOKS.

MR. COURTHOPE'S "POPE."*

WITH the ninth and tenth volumes now before us, this great edition of a distinguished poet comes to a conclusion as far as Mr. Courthope's editorial labours are concerned. Four volumes have been required for Pope's poetry, and five for his corre- spondence ; but between the verse and prose there is a gap in the continuity of the volumes, and Volume V. is to contain the poet's life and a general index.

Fifteen years have passed away since the first volume of the works appeared, with an elaborate introduction by Mr. Elwin, and more years than we care to count since the advertisement of a new edition of Pope's works appeared in the Quarterly Review. Originally, as readers interested in the subject are aware, the project was in the hands of Mr. Croker and of Mr. Peter Cunningham. When it was passed over to Mr. Elwin, he had not only the advantage of his predecessors' researches in a very fruitful field, but was largely indebted also to the dis- coveries—for such they deserve to be called—of the late Mr. Dilke. Pope's "schemes of epistolary fame," as Swift termed them, led to a series of manoeuvres and plots that form what Mr. Elwin not unjustly styles "a network of fraud." This falsehood on the poet's part had been in a measure suspected by Johnson, but how far it extended and how much it involved was unknown until our time. It is difficult for any editor to do justice to an author whose character he despises, and Mr. Elwin's criticism of Pope's poetry seems to have been influenced, no doubt unconsciously, by his contempt for Pope's duplicity. It is not surprising, therefore, that he should have grown weary of his labours, and left the completion of the work to a younger hand. What Mr. Courthope has done is, we think, highly creditable to his knowledge and tact. Of course, the tone of the comments is different since Mr. Elwin left the field ; but, on the whole, it is, we think, more just. Mr. Court- hope has not more knowledge of his subject than Mr. Elwin, possibly not so much, for the late editor's acquaintance with the Queen Anne men is well-nigh unrivalled; but his characteristic as a critic of Pope was antipathy, while Mr. Courthope's is sympathy, not, indeed, with the errors of the man, but with the genius of the poet.

It cannot, we think, be reiterated too strongly in the present day—and in the face of a brilliant clique of critics it needs some boldness to say it—that Pope is none the less a poet because there were greater men before his time, and have been greater since. To the notion current in the early years of the century. that neither Dryden nor Pope were to be ranked among the poets, Wordsworth, rarely a genial critic of any verse except his own, contributed not a little; while Coleridge, the subtlest critic in the language on matters poetical, was content with calling Pope a delightful writer. The controversy waxed hot in Byron's time, and is not silent yet; but it seems superfluous. All depends, as Coleridge said, on the definition of poetry. But can any one definition explain an art so comprehensive P As well might you restrict the plastic art to the idealisations of painters like Raffaelle and Veronese, and deny the genius of Terburg and Teniers. This, at least, we know on reading such poems as " Eloise and Abelard," " The Rape of the Lock," the " Moral Essays," and the " Imitations of Horace," that the emotion and delight they afford could not be produced by the most eloquent prose, any more than the lofty lines of Johnson in his famous satires would admit of being uttered in a prosaic form. There is surely true poetry here of a kind, just as there is poetry of another and more imaginative kind in Shelley's " Ode to the West Wind," or Keats's " Ode to a Nightingale."

Pope as a poet and satirist stands on a very different footing from Pope as a letter-writer. In the one art he is a master ; in the other, he is perpetually striving to do what he never succeeds in doing. The correspondence garnered up in five volumes of this edition has an interest which is far from being wholly due to the poet's own letters. Simplicity and sincerity are virtues indispensable to the letter-writer, and Pope has neither. The same strain animates all his communications, whether with acquaintances or with intimate friends. He in effusive in his benevolence, he expresses a disregard of fame, he loves nothing

• The Works of Alexander Pope. New Edition, including several hundred unpublished Lettere and other New Materials, collected in part by the bite Right Hon. John Wilson Croker. With Introductions and Notes by the Rev. Whitwell Elwin and William John Courthope, M.A. Vols. IX. and X. " Corre- spondence," Vols. IV. and V. London John Murray. 1886.

but virtue, of his poetry he thinks little, and it is his chief boast that he is an honest man. Then he has no ambition, and has let the world alone from his very entrance into it. Congreve on receiving a visit from Voltaire, requested to be considered not as an author, but as a gentleman, to which his guest pertinently replied that if he had been only a gentleman, he should not have come to visit him. On turning to the letters between Pope and Aaron Hill, we are reminded of this anecdote. In a letter written to excuse or to explain the lines which refer to Hill in the Dunciad, Pope, after observing that he was never angry at any criticism made on his poetry, " by whomsoever," adds :-

" I see by many marks, you distinguished me from my contem- porary writers; had we known one another, you had distinguished me from others as a man, and no ill or ill-natured one. I only wish you knew as well as I do, how mach I prefer qualities of the heart to those of the head. I vow to God, I never thought any great matters of my poetical capacity; I only thought it a little better, compara- tively, than that of some very mean writers, who are too proud. Bnt I do know certainly, my moral life is superior to that of most of the wits of these days."

Hill, who was not a little aggrieved at the treatment he had received, replies in language which must have made Pope a little uncomfortable :—

"I am sorry to hear you say, you never thought any great matters of your poetry. It is, in my opinion, the characteristic you are to hope your distinction from. To be honest is the duty of every plain man. Nor, since the soul of poetry is sentiment, can a great poet want morality. Bnt your honesty you possess in common with a million who will never be remembered, whereas your poetry is a peculiar that will make it impossible you should be forgotten. If yon had not been in the spleen when you wrote me this letter, I persuade myself you would not, immediately after censuring the pride of writers, have asserted that you certainly knew your moral life above that of most of the wits of these days. At any other time, you would have remembered that humility is a moral virtue. It was a bold declaration, and the certainty with which you know it, stands in need of a better acquaintance than you seem to have had with the tribe, since you tell me in the same letter that many of -their names were unknown to you."

It was not often Pope received a slap so direct and vigorous as this, and the way in which he replies, and the effusive senti- ments of esteem that circulate between the correspondents after- wards, present a comical effect to the reader. Pope protests that though his poetry may make him remembered, it is his morality only that must make him beloved, and that he prefers friendships to fame. Hill agrees with him that morality makes us beloved, and adds :—" I know it from the effect of your writings, where I but admire the harmony and the elegance, while I love the generosity and the candour of the sentiments ;" and then the two praise each other's writings again and again, after a fashion not wholly extinct in our own day. Pope considers that a tragedy of Hill's which failed on the stage is like a great treasure which is buried as soon as brought to light, but "is sure to be dug np the next age and enrich posterity ;" and Hill, after praising one of Pope's satires which " carries the acrimony of

Juvenal with the Horatian air of ease and serenity," and adding a good deal more in praise of its high morality, exclaims :- " Go on to make war, with a courage that reproaches a nation's ; and live (would you could !) just as long as till the virtues your spirit would propagate become as general as the esteem of your genius !" The satire, by the way, to which this balderdash refers was the first part of the epilogue to the Satires, which appeared on the same morning as Johnson's London, and it is pleasant to remember that Pope, then at the high-water mark of his fame, showed no jealousy of his unknown rival.

Pope has been accused of being too fond of Lords, and certainly the volume before us would suffice to prove, had we no other testimony to the fact, that his acquaintance with the nobility was extensive. It cannot be said, however, that the poet ever pandered to the great. "I take myself," he writes to Lord

Carteret, " to be the only scribbler of my time of any degree of distinction who never received any places from the Establish- ment, any pension from a Court, or any presents from a Ministry." For once Pope wrote truly. His independence was one of the best traits in his character. In the company of Dukes and Lords he did not forget that he was the first poet of the age, though he carried his indifference to the claims of high life too far when he fell asleep in the presence of the Prince of Wales. On the other hand, it must be remembered that, as a Roman Catholic, Pope could not, even had he desired it, have obtained any Public recognition from Government. " I am not a Papist," he wrote to Atterbary, "far I renounce the temporal invasions of the Papal power, and detest their arrogated authority over Princes and States. I am a Catholic in the

strictest sense of the word." To Lord Harcourt he expressed himself in similar but stronger language, observing, "If to be a Papist be to hold any [tenets] that are adverse to or destructive of the present Government, King, or Constitution, I am no

Papist." Pope's creed would not satisfy the more exacting Ultramontanism of our day ; but, mild as it was, it made the poet liable to privations and penalties, and on a threatened invasion by France and the Pretender, he, like other Roman Catholics, appears to have been under surveillance. "The utmost I can do," he writes to Allen, "I will venture, to tell in your ear. I may slide along the Surrey side (where no Middlesex justice can pretend any cognizance) to Battersea, and thence cross the water for an hour or two in a close chair to dine with you or so. But to be in town I fear will be imprudent and thought insolent.

At least hitherto, all comply with the proolamation:' One interest attaching to a correspondence like this is to be found in the difference it discloses between that age and our own. It is strange, for instance, to find the poet writing from Stowe to say that he dreads the journey to Worcester, " for every one tells me it is perpetual rock, and the worst of rugged roads." He discovers that it does not snit him to dine at such a fashionable hour as four o'clock. He tells Martha Blount that he had had a letter ready to send to her for three days, but was disappointed by the post-boy not calling, and we read of his spending a day with Dr. Arbuthnot at Hampstead, where that famous wit and physician, who, according to Swift, could do everything but walk, was to be seen at the Long Room half the morning, and had parties at cards every night. Those were days when people flocked to Hampstead to drink the waters, and when physicians of high repute set up their tents there during the summer months. Pope himself tried the well at Bristol, but found the water too cold, and had no comfort but in asses' milk, for drinking which he had sneered at Lord Harvey four years previously. Like most valetudinarians, he was constantly trying new remedies, some of them, after the fashion of the time, being exceedingly unpleasant. The lancet then, and for well-nigh a century afterwards, was in high repute. Pope's friend, Hugh Bethel, observes that Dr. Cheyne had advised him to take four or five ounces of blood every full moon, and advises Pope to try that remedy, adding, " You are too thin and weak for an issue."

In the two volumes there is a singular paucity of literary comment. Atterbury requests Pope to polish Samson. Agonistes. " which is capable of being improved with little trouble into a perfect model and standard of tragic poetry." Pope, writing to Hughes, says with wiser criticism, " Spenser has been ever a favourite poet to me; he is like a mistress whose faults we see, but love her with them all." On the contrary, he blunders in terming Drayton "a very mediocre poet ;" but with the excep- tion of Shakespeare and Spenser, Pope knew little of the Elizabethan poets,—not more, perhaps, than Dryden, who mis- took the sex of Gorboduc. Among the books mentioned in the correspondence is Scuderi's Grand Cyrus. Pope sent the volume as a present to Martha Blount, an indication that the inter-

minable romance which some great French preachers held in high esteem, had never gone out of fashion in England. The days of the English novel were yet to dawn.

The letters of Pope to the woman he loved best in the world are not particularly interesting, and have none of the natural ease and charm which make Swift's to " Stella " so attractive. It shows the intolerable coarseness of the age, that passages from these letters to a young lady should be omitted as "unfit for publication." Occasionally, as in writing of the death of Gay and of the growing weakness of his mother, there are signs of deep feeling. As a son, indeed. Pope's conduct was always tender, always considerate, and it is the heart of the man, and not the artifice cf the letter-writer, that is expressed in the following passage. He is referring to the death of Gay : -

" The subject is beyond writing upon,, beyond cure or ease, by reason or reflection, beyond all bat one thought, that it is the will of God. So will the death of my mother be ! which now I tremble at, now resign to, now bring close to me, now set farther off ; every day alters, tarns me about and confuses my whole frame of mind."

"Life, after the first warm heats are over, is all downhill," he writes in the next letter, and no doubt felt what he wrote, for be was ill and he was lonely. Swift told Pope once that Patty

Blount had written to him, "-and is one of the best letter- writers I know ; very good sense, civility, and friendship with- out any stiffness or constraint" Martha's letters may be read. in Volume VII. of the works, printed, according to the rule laid down by Mr. Elwin, in the spelling to which we are accustomed.

Mr. Courthope, however, appears in several instances to have broken through this rule, and letters in the two volumes before us are occasionally printed with the old-fashioned contractions familiar to our forefathers, as is the following short letter from Martha :—

"Sr,—We shall be at home all friday & expect you soon after dinner. Your dangers on the water that night I can immagine from what George told us; yr wine is come saffe."

Pope's letters to ladies are more remarkable for compliments than refinement, as will be seen in the correspondence with " Lady Mary ;" but in this case the lady herself transgresses nearly as much as Pope. The series of letters to Judith Cowper, the aunt of the poet, have the gallantry peculiar to the period ; but it is difficult to understand how a sensible woman could tolerate sueh compliments as Pope pays her. " In one word," he says, "your writings are very good and very entertaining ; but not so good nor so entertaining as your life and conversa- tion. One is but the effect and emanation of the other. It will always be a greater pleasure to me to know you are well than that you write well ; though every time you tell me the one, I must know the other." In another letter, after calling himself a creature who wishes he had never seen her, he adds :—

" You have spoiled him for a solitaire and a book, all the days of his life; and put him into such a condition that he thinks of nothing, and inquires of nothing, but after a person who has nothing to say to him, and has left hitii for ever without hope of ever again regarding, or pleasing, or entertaining him, much less of seeing him. He has been so mad with the idea of her as to steal her picture, and passes whole days in sitting before it, talking to himself and (as some people imagine) slaking verses ; but it is no each matter; for as long as he can get any of hers, he can never turn his head to hie own, it is so mach better entertained."

Among the large number of letters collected in these volumes, there are many now printed for the first time ; but none of them, so far as we have observed, are of any special interest. One difficulty that besets editors in our days is to exercise a wise choice in sifting the rubbish left behind him by a famous man. That some passages in Pope's prose writings and in his letters should be omitted will be regretted by no one, and it is obvious that there must be a good deal in the enormous mass of his correspondence unworthy of preservation. " The collection," Mr. Courthope writes," might have been considerably increased, as among both the Warburton MSS. and the Homer MSS. in the British Museum there are a number of letters which are not included in this edition. In the one case I found that Warbur- ton had selected from the correspondence all the letters that were really interesting ; in the other the matter of the letters was so slight as not to be worth reproduction."

Mr. Courthope deserves to be thanked for this decision ; but we regret that he gives no reason for not including Pope's Homer in this standard edition of his works. It cannot be said of that translation, whatever judgment may be formed of its value, that it is unworthy of reproduction.