care to read now, as it deals with a rather coarse and wicked age. The next great novel was Smollett's Peregrine Pickle. In his following book, Amelia, Fielding gave a picture of English womanhood; and Richardson, in Sir Charles Grandison, drew a portrait of his idea of a perfect English gentleman. 17. Though these novels are very long, and most readers now find them very dull, they were useful at the time in turning people's thoughts from the artificial writing of the French style to the pictures of real life and society, and they awoke a desire for reading in a large number of people who before this had taken little interest in literature. 18. In poetry, however, French rules of art still held sway. There still continued to be that race of critics who could not appreciate Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer; who voted them coarse and barbarous because they fancied those poets offended against French rules of art. Absurd verse-writers arose who called themselves poets because they managed to string together a jingle of rhymes without any sense. Both critics and verse-makers needed a severe lesson, and they got it from a little, weakly poet, whose dwarf body, however, contained a giant mind. His name was Alexander Pope. CHAPTER XXI. A QUEEN ANNE POET. 1. The father of ALEXANDER POPE was a linen-draper in London, and a Roman Catholic. When William and Mary came to the throne, and there were again harsh laws against his religion, he left London and went to live at Binfield, on the outskirts of Windsor Forest. There the little sickly, sensitive boy would no doubt feel happier than he afterwards was at the schools at Twyford and London to which he was sent for a time. He had lessons with a Roman Catholic priest, but much of his time was spent in reading and making verses. He says of himself, he "lisped in numbers, for the numbers came "—meaning that even as a child he wrote verses. One of his favourite books was the poets' poem, The Faerie Queene, for which Milton too had a great love when a boy. No doubt, on a fine summer day he Iwould love to wander forth into the wonderful old forest where William the Conqueror and his son Rufus used to hunt, and lie beneath some great gnarled oak-tree picturing the Red Cross Knight, with Una and the dwarf, advancing underneath the flickering branches. 2. It was at this time that he began his poem Windsor Forest, though he did not finish it until some time afterwards. After he had been at school, Pope began to make translations in verse of Latin authors, and also to imitate old English poets. When he was only sixteen he wrote his Pastorals, and though they were not published for some years, yet they were read in manuscript by a good many people, who began to talk of the boy as a rising poet, and to invite him to their houses to meet literary men. For instance, when Pope was in London he saw He 3. Pope's first great work was an Essay on Criticism. saw that English literature was in great danger from the false criticism which was then fashionable, and he showed that the ancient poets in their truth to nature were true to law, and that their poems are full of "Nameless graces, which no methods teach." Pope declared that a critic, like a poet, is born, not made-born with a taste for discovering true beauty and art, though this taste must be cultivated by the study of nature and of the best poets and authors, and not by merely learning a number of artificial rules. Even then a critic should be careful in judging of a great work, because so few people are able to perfectly understand and grasp a really grand masterpiece. The critic must put aside his own narrow ideas and be in sympathy with the writer. 4. Pope showed how the critics of his own day failed because they did not do this, and because they thought more of the form or style than of the sense of the work. He also pointed out how much harm was done by authors struggling with one another to secure the patronage of great men. They took no pains to hide their envy, rivalry, and spite, but showed them in their works. Party spirit was also a great deal to blame for the evil that had crept into literature in Pope's day. At the end of his essay Pope gives two pictures-one is that of the true critic of former days : 66 'Though learned, well bred; and though well bred, sincere; Who to a friend his faults can freely show, Here, on the other hand, is the critic of Pope's day: : (853) 8 "The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, 5. Pope suffered severely from the critics of his time, and, being very sensitive, he felt their attacks most keenly; so he sometimes wrote somewhat bitter answers to these attacks. About twenty years after he had written the Essay on Criti cism, he wrote his satire called The Dunciad (that is, the epic of dunces), in which he ridiculed many of those who had attacked him, and others who, instead of earning an honest livelihood in a humble way, aspired to be poets because they could string together a few rhymes with plenty of sound but no sense. They would do anything for money, these false poets, and often took payment from great men for writing praise of them or abuse of their political opponents. 6. Pope was very different from these "pretender" poets. He was a poet both by nature and education; and it was fortunate for him, as his health would have kept him from any active employment. Even as it was, his life was a hard struggle between the weak body and the keen, active brain. We must remember this when we read his works, and make allowance for the bitterness he sometimes shows. His deformity made him very sensitive and irritable, and he had not many friends. A lady called Martha Blount was a life-long friend, and helped Pope greatly by her sympathy and firm friendship in his hours of loneliness and ill-health. You re 7. For twenty-eight years Pope lived with his father and mother at Binfield. He used to go to London sometimes and meet literary men like Swift, Steele, and Addison. member that he sometimes wrote poetry for The Spectator. He also was very industriously making translations, which at that time were well paid, and brought him large sums of money. His principal translations were of Homer's two poems-the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey." 8. One of Pope's poems was finished when he was about twenty-six. It is called The Rape of the Lock, which means the theft of a tress of hair. It is what is called a mock-heroic or mock epic, and illustrates what Swift was mocking at in Gulliver's Travels-the absurdity of great quarrels arising from very small causes. The cause in this case was that a young nobleman (Lord Petre) had snipped off a tress of Miss Arabella Fermor's hair, and the two families got so indignant about it that for many years there was a deadly enmity between them. Pope wanted to reconcile them by his poem. He gives very amusing descriptions of the toilet of Belinda (so he calls the lady) as she is about to start with a water-party on the Thames for Hampton Court. 9. All goes well until they reach Hampton Court, where, after amusing themselves, they have coffee. Then one of the ladies, called Clarissa, taking a pair of scissors from the chatelaine at her side, in a mischievous mood hands them to the baron. He cannot resist the temptation to seize one of the two curls hanging on Belinda's white neck, and just as she bends over her cup he puts forth the "two-edged weapon." "The meeting points the sacred hair dissever Very merrily Pope describes the anger of the lady, and the quarrel between the friends of both families. The tress of hair can nowhere be found, for it has been carried away by the breeze, and Pope pretends to believe it has become a star, telling how it will endure after the other tresses shall have been laid in the grave. "This lock the muse shall consecrate to fame, And midst the stars inscribe Belinda's name. 10. Soon after he published The Rape of the Lock, Pope and his parents moved to Chiswick, a place on the Thames near Richmond. There the poet's father died; and then Pope bought some land higher up the Thames, at Twickenham, and built a villa. He laid out the gardens in the stiff artificial way then fashionable, and built a grotto beneath the road leading to his gardens on the other side. This grotto was hung round with mirrors, so arranged as to reflect the river and the hills. Pope |