Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/502

482 POPE more indulgent to his elfish and sprite-like temper. But, apart from this, intriguing was the way of his world, a fact too much kept out of sight when Pope is denounced for his crooked ways in little matters, as if he had lived in our own straightforward and virtuous age. If we are to judge Pope, whether as a man or as a poet, with human fairness, and not merely by comparison with standards of abstract perfection, there are two features of his times that must be kept steadily in view the character of political strife in those days, and the political relations of men of letters. As long as the succession to the crown was doubtful, and political failure might mean loss of property, banishment, or death, politicians, playing for higher stakes, played more fiercely and unscrupulously than in modern days, and there was no controlling force of public opinion to keep them within the bounds of common honesty. Hence the age of Queen Anne is pre-eminently an age of intrigue. The government was almost as un settled as in the early days of personal monarchy, and there was this difference that it was policy rather than force upon which men depended for keeping their position. Secondly, men of letters were admitted to the inner circles of intrigue as they had never been before and as they have never been since. A generation later Walpole defied them, and paid the rougher instruments that he considered sufficient for his purpose in solid coin of the realm ; but Queen Anne s statesmen, whether from difference of tastes or difference of policy, paid their principal literary champions with social privileges and honourable public appointments. Hence men of letters were directly in fected by the low political morality of the unsettled time. And the character of their poetry also suffered. The most prominent defects of our Augustan age in 19th- century eyes the lack of high and sustained imagination, the genteel liking for " nature to advantage dressed," the incessant striving after wit were fostered if not generated by the social atmosphere. The works of the serious imagination could not thrive in a fashionable society, feverishly interested in the daily chances of intrigue for place and power. Pope was peculiarly fitted by nature to take the im press of his surroundings plastic, sensitive, eagerly covetous of approbation. Affection and admiration were as necessary to his life as the air he breathed. " Pope was from his birth," Johnson says, "of a constitution tender and delicate, but is said to have shown remarkable gentle ness and sweetness of disposition. The weakness of his body continued through his life ; but the mildness of his mind perhaps ended with his childhood." Perhaps; but certainly to a much less degree wdth the friends who loved and honoured him. With them he was always more or less sweet and docile; his petulance and malignity were directed as by an instinct of self-preservation against those who baulked him in his craving for admiration, a spiritual food literally and physically essential to the sustenance of his fragile being. If Pope had been a man of more robust and self-suffic ing constitution, lie had one great advantage for resisting the spirit of his age. He was cut off by the religion of his parents from all public employment. His father was a Roman Catholic, a merchant in Lombard Street, 1 London, who retired from business with a small fortune in the year of the Revolution, and fixed hia residence at Binfield in Windsor Forest. Pope was born at Lombard Street on 1 According to his own statement to Spence, his "Conversations" with whom are the chief authority for all the incidents of his youth. The value of the authority is much suspected. " He was more willing to show what his father was not than what he was," and Johnson accepted the statement that lie was "a linen-draper in the Strand." Pope s vanity also renders doubtful in some details what he says about his own precocity. May 22, 1G88, but his father s retirement to Binfield took place soon after his birth. The delicate child s book i education was desultory and irregular. His father s religion excluded him from the public schools, if there was no other impediment to his being sent there. Before he was twelve he got a smattering of Latin and Greek from various masters, from a priest in Hampshire, from a schoolmaster at Twyford near Winchester, from another in Marylebone, from a third at Hyde Park Corner, and finally from another priest at home. " He thought him self the better," Spence says, "in some respects for not having had a regular education. He (as he observed in particular) read originally for the sense, whereas we are taught for so many years to read only for words." This helps to explain his attack on Bentley in the Dunciad. He afterwards learnt French and Italian, probably to a similar extent. As far as the sense was concerned, he could get a dilution of that at least in translations, for all poets of note Greek, Latin, French, and Italian had been translated into English verse in the course of the previous century. Of these translations the precocious boy availed himself voraciously, and by the age of twelve, when he was finally settled at home and left to himself, he was not only a confirmed reader, but an eager aspirant to the high est honours in poetry. When at school in London he had crept into Will s coffee-house to look at Dryden ; he had lampooned his schoolmaster, and made a play out of Ogilby s Iliad for his schoolfellows ; and, thinking him self the greatest genius that ever was, he retired to the solitude of the forest to write a great epic on a mytho logical subject, his hero being Alcander, a prince of Rhodes. Nothing of Pope s was printed till 1709, when he was twenty-one. The detachment from contemporary life in London which his father s religion and retirement might have occasioned w r as prevented by one of the accidents of that position. Fortunately or unfortunately for him, there were among the Papist families near Binfield men capable of giving a direction to his eager ambition, men of literary tastes, and connexions with the literary world. These families held together as persecuted sects always do, and the family priests were mediums of communica tion. Through some such medium the retired merchant s pre cocious son was brought under the notice of Sir William Trumbull, a retired diplomatist living at Easthampstead, within a few miles of Binfield, At Whiteknights, near Reading, lived another Roman Catholic, Mr Englefield, "a great lover of poets and poetry." Through him Pope made the acquaintance of Wycherley and Harry Cromwell, and Wycherley introduced him to Walsh, then of great renown as a critic. Thus the aspiring poet, before he was seventeen, was admitted to the society of London "wits" and men of fashion, and he was cordially encouraged as a prodigy. It may be doubted whether the company of these veteran relics of Restoration manners was much for the benefit of the moral tone of the bookish youth, who learnt from them to speak and write of the fair sex with a very knowing air of rakish gaiety. But he discussed poetry also with them, as was then the fashion, and soon under their influence his own vague aspirations received shape and direction. Walsh s contribution to his development was the advice to study "correctness," as the one merit that was still possible for an English poet. But before he was intro duced to Walsh, which was in 1705, he had already written the first draft of his " Pastorals," a subject on which Walsh was an authority, having written the preface to Dryden s translation of Virgil s Edof/ues. TrumbulPs

influence was earlier and more extensive. For him may