Theological Essays and Other Papers v2

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What made Lord Byron undertake the patronage of Pope? It was, as usually
happened with _him_, a motive of hostility to some contemporaries. He
wished to write up Pope by way of writing down others. But, whatever
were the motive, we may judge of the style in which he carried out his
intentions by the following well-known _mot_. Having mentioned the
poets, he compares them with the moralists--'the moralists,' these are
his words, 'the moralists, their betters.' How, or in what sense that
would satisfy even a lampooner, are moralists as a class the 'betters'
in a collation with poets as a class? It is pretty clear at starting
that, _in order_ to be a moralist of the first rank, that is, to carry
a great moral truth with heart-shaking force into the mind, a moralist
must begin by becoming a poet. For instance, 'to justify the ways of
God to man.' _That_ is a grand moral doctrine; but to utter the doctrine
authentically a man must write a 'Paradise Lost.' The order of
precedency, therefore, between poets and moralists, as laid down by
Lord Byron, is very soon inverted by a slight effort of reflection.

But without exacting from a man so self-willed as Lord Byron (and at
that moment in a great passion) any philosophic vigor, it may be worth
while, so far as the case concerns Pope, to ponder for one moment upon
this invidious comparison, and to expose the fallacy which it conceals.
By the term _moralist_ we indicate two kinds of thinkers, differing
as much in quality as a chestnut horse from horse chestnut, and in
rank as a Roman proconsul from the nautical consul's first clerk at
a seaport. A clerical moralist in a pulpit, reading a sermon, is a
moralist in the sense of one who applies the rules of a known ethical
system, viz., that system which is contained in the New Testament, to
the ordinary cases of human action. Such a man pretends to no
originality--it would be criminal in him to do so; or, if he seeks for
novelty in any shape or degree, it is exclusively in the quality of
his illustrations. But there is another use of the word _moralist_,
which indicates an intellectual architect of the first class. A Grecian
moralist was one who published a new _theory_ of morals--that is, he
assumed some new central principle, from which he endeavored, with
more or less success, to derive all the virtues and vices, and thus
introduced new relations amongst the keys or elementary gamut of our
moral nature. [Footnote 6] For example, the Peripatetic system of
morality, that of Aristotle, had for its fundamental principle, that
all vices formed one or other of two polar extremes, one pole being
in excess, the other in defect; and that the corresponding virtue lay
on an equatorial line between these two poles. Here, because the new
principle became a law of coercion for the entire system, since it
must be carried out harmoniously with regard to every element that
could move a question, the difficulties were great, and hardly to be
met by mere artifices of ingenuity. The legislative principle needed
to be profound and comprehensive; and a moralist in this sense, the
founder of an ethical system, really looked something like a great man.

But, valued upon that scale. Pope is nobody; or in Newmarket language,
if ranked against Chrysippus, or Plato, or Aristotle, or Epicurus, he
would be found 'nowhere.' He is reduced, therefore, at one blow to the
level of a pulpit moralist, or mere applier of moral laws to human
actions. And in a function so exceedingly humble, philosophically
considered, how could he pretend to precedency in respect of anybody,
unless it were the amen clerk, or the sexton?

In reality, however, the case is worse, If a man did really bring all
human actions under the light of any moral system whatever, provided
that he _could_ do so sternly, justly, and without favor this way or
that, he would perform an exemplary service, such as no man ever _has_
performed. And this is what we mean by casuistry, which is the
application of a moral principle to the _cases_ arising in human life.
A _case_ means a genuine class of human acts, but differentiated in
the way that law cases are. For we see that every case in the law
courts conforms in the major part to the genuine class; but always,
or nearly always, it presents some one differential feature peculiar
to itself; and the question about it always is, Whether the differential
feature is sufficient to take it out of the universal rule, or whether,
in fact, it ought not to disturb the incidence of the legal rule? This
is what we mean by casuistry. All law in its practical processes is
a mode of casuistry. And it is clear that any practical ethics, ethics
applied to the realities of life, ought to take the professed shape
of casuistry. We do not evade the thing by evading the name. But because
casuistry under that name, has been chiefly cultivated by the Roman
Catholic Church, we Protestants, with our ridiculous prudery, find a
stumbling-block in the very name. This, however, is the only service
that _can_ be rendered to morality among us. And nothing approaching
to this has been attempted by Pope.

What is it, then, that he _has_ attempted? Certainly he imagines himself
to have done something or other in behalf of moral philosophy. For in
a well-known couplet he informs us--

'That not in Fancy's maze he lingered long, But stooped to Truth, and
_moralized_ his song.'

Upon these lines a lady once made to me this very acute and significant
remark. The particular direction, she said, in which Pope fancied that
he came upon Truth, showed pretty clearly what sort of truth it was
that he searched after. Had he represented Fancy, as often is done,
soaring aloft amongst the clouds, then, because Truth must be held to
lie in the opposite direction, there might have been pleaded a necessity
for _descending_ upon Truth, like one who is looking for mushrooms.
But as Fancy, by good luck, is simply described as roaming about amongst
labyrinths, which are always constructed upon dead levels, he had left
it free for himself to soar after Truth into the clouds. But _that_
was a mode of truth which Pope cared little for; if _she_ chose to go
galavanting amongst the clouds, Pope, for _his_ part, was the last
person to follow her. Neither was he the man to go down into a well
in search of her. Truth was not liable to wet feet--but Pope _was_.
And he had no such ardor for Truth as would ever lead him to forget
that wells were damp, and bronchitis alarming to a man of his
constitution.

Whatever service Pope may have meditated to the philosophy of morals,
he has certainly performed none. The direct contributions which he
offered to this philosophy in his 'Essay on Man,' are not of a nature
to satisfy any party; because at present the whole system may be read
into different, and sometimes into opposite meanings, according to the
quality of the integrations supplied for filling up the chasms in the
chain of the development. The sort of service, however, expected from
Pope in such a field, falls in better with the style of his satires
and moral epistles than of a work professedly metaphysical. Here,
however, most eminently it is that the falseness and hypocrisy which
besieged his satirical career have made themselves manifest; and the
dilemma for any working-man who should apply himself to these sections
of Pope's writings is precisely this: Reading them with the slight and
languid attention which belongs to ordinary reading, they will make
no particular discoveries of Pope's hollowness and treacherous
infidelities to the truth, whether as to things or persons; but in
such a case neither will they reap any benefit. On the other hand, if
they so far carry out Lord Carlisle's advice as to enter upon the study
of Pope in the spirit of earnest students, and so as really to possess
themselves of the key to his inner mind, they will rise from their
labors not so much in any spirit of gratitude for enlarged and
humanizing views of man, as in a spirit of cynical disgust at finding
that such views can be so easily counterfeited, and so often virtually
betrayed.

[The paper of last month, [Footnote 7] on Lord Carlisle's lecture,
having been written under the oppression of a nervous illness,
accompanied by great suffering, may probably enough have been found
heavy. Another objection to that paper is, that it too easily _assumes_
the radical falseness, of Pope, as a notorious fact needing no evidence
or illustration. To myself it _did_ not need either. But to any casual
reader, whose attention had never been attracted to the
circumstantialities of Pope's satiric sketches, this assumption would
be startling; and it would have done him a service to offer a few
exemplifications of the vice attributed to Pope, both as substantiating
the charge, and as investing it with some little amusement. This it
had been my intention to do at the moment; but being disabled by the
illness above-mentioned, I now supply the omission.]

Whom shall we pronounce a fit writer to be laid before an auditory of
working-men, as a model of what is just in composition--fit either for
conciliating their regard to literature at first or afterwards for
sustaining it? The qualifications for such a writer are apparently
these two: first, that he should deal chiefly with the elder and
elementary affections of man, and under those relations which concern
man's grandest capacities;--secondly, that he should treat his subject
with solemnity, and not with sneer--with earnestness, as one under a
prophet's burden of impassioned truth, and not with the levity of a
girl hunting a chance-started caprice. I admire Pope in the very highest
degree; but I admire him as a pyrotechnic for producing brilliant and
evanescent effects out of elements that have hardly a moment's life
within them. There is a flash and a startling explosion, then there
is a dazzling coruscation, all purple and gold; the eye aches under
the suddenness of a display that, springing like a burning arrow out
of darkness, rushes back into darkness with arrowy speed, and in a
moment all is over. Like festal shows, or the hurrying music of such
shows--

'It _was_, and it is not.'

Untruly, therefore, was it ever fancied of Pope, that he belonged by
his classification to the family of the Drydens. Dryden had within him
a principle of continuity which was not satisfied without lingering
upon his own thoughts, brooding over them, and oftentimes pursuing
them through their unlinkings with the _sequaciousness_ (pardon a
Coleridgian word) that belongs to some process of creative nature,
such as the unfolding of a flower. But Pope was all jets and tongues
of flame; all showers of scintillation and sparkle. Dryden followed,
genially, an impulse of his healthy nature. Pope obeyed, spasmodically,
an overmastering febrile paroxysm. Even in these constitutional
differences between the two are written and are legible the
corresponding necessities of 'utter falsehood in Pope, and of loyalty
to truth in Dryden.' Strange it is to recall this one striking fact,
that if once in his life Dryden might reasonably have been suspected
of falsehood, it was in the capital matter of religion. He _ratted_
from his Protestant faith; and according to the literal origin of that
figure he _ratted_; for he abjured it as rats abjure a ship in which
their instinct of divination has deciphered a destiny of ruin, and at
the very moment when Popery wore the promise of a triumph that might,
at any rate, have lasted his time. Dryden was a Papist by apostasy;
and perhaps, not to speak uncharitably, upon some bias from
self-interest. Pope, on the other hand, was a Papist by birth, and by
a tie of honor; and he resisted all temptations to desert his afflicted
faith, which temptations lay in bribes of great magnitude prospectively,
and in persecutions for the present that were painfully humiliating.
How base a time-server does Dryden appear on the one side!--on the
other, how much of a martyr should we be disposed to pronounce Pope!
And yet, for all that, such is the overruling force of a nature
originally sincere, the apostate Dryden wore upon his brow the grace
of sincerity, whilst the pseudo-martyr Pope, in the midst of actual
fidelity to his Church, was at his heart a traitor--in the very oath
of his allegiance to his spiritual mistress had a lie upon his lips,
scoffed at her whilst kneeling in homage to her pretensions, and
secretly forswore her doctrines whilst suffering insults in her service.

The differences as to truth and falsehood lay exactly where, by all
the external symptoms, they ought _not_ to have lain. But the reason
for this anomaly was, that to Dryden sincerity had been a perpetual
necessity of his intellectual nature, whilst Pope, distracted by his
own activities of mind, living in an irreligious generation, and beset
by infidel friends, had early lost his anchorage of traditional belief;
and yet, upon an honorable scruple of fidelity to the suffering church
of his fathers, he sought often to dissemble the fact of his own
scepticism, which yet often he thirsted ostentatiously to parade.
Through a motive of truthfulness he became false. And in this particular
instance he would, at any rate, have become false, whatever had been
the native constitution of his mind. It was a mere impossibility to
reconcile any real allegiance to his church with his known irreverence
to religion. But upon far more subjects than this Pope was habitually
false in the quality of his thoughts, always insincere, never by any
accident in earnest, and consequently many times caught in ruinous
self-contradiction. Is that the sort of writer to furnish an
advantageous study for the precious leisure, precious as rubies, of
the toil-worn artisan?

The root and the pledge of this falseness in Pope lay in a disease of
his mind, which he (like the Roman poet Horace) mistook for a feature
of preternatural strength; and this disease was the incapacity of
self-determination towards any paramount or abiding _principles_.
Horace, in a well-known passage, had congratulated himself upon this
disease as upon a trophy of philosophic emancipation:

'Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri,
Quo me cunque rapit tempestas, deferor liospes:'

which words Pope thus translates, and applies to himself in his English
adaptation of this epistle:--

'But ask not to what doctors I apply--
Sworn to no master, of no sect am I.
As drives the storm, at any door I knock;
And house with Montaigne now, or now with Locke.'

That is, neither one poet nor the other having, as regarded philosophy,
any internal principle of gravitation or determining impulse to draw
him in one direction rather than another, was left to the random control
of momentary taste, accident, or caprice; and this indetermination of
pure, unballasted levity both Pope and Horace mistook for a special
privilege of philosophic strength. Others, it seems, were chained and
coerced by sertain fixed aspects of truth, and their efforts were
overruled accordingly in one uniform line of direction. But _they_,
the two brilliant poets, fluttered on butterfly-wings to the right and
the left, obeying no guidance but that of some instant and fugitive
sensibility to some momentary phasis of beauty. In this dream of drunken
eclecticism, and in the original possibility of such an eclecticism,
lay the ground of that enormous falsehood which Pope practised from
youth to age. An eclectic philosopher already, in the very title which
he assumes, proclaims his self-complacency in the large liberty of
error purchased by the renunciation of all controlling principles.
Having severed the towing-line which connected him with any external
force of guiding and compulsory truth, he is free to go astray in any
one of ten thousand false radiations from the true centre of rest. By
his own choice he is wandering in a forest all but pathless,

---'ubi passim.
Pallantes error recto de tramite pellit;'

and a forest not of sixty days' journey, like that old Hercynian forest
of Caesar's time, but a forest which sixty generations have not availed
to traverse or familiarize in any one direction.

For Horace, as I have endeavored to explain in the note, the apology
is so much the readier as his intrusions into this province of
philosophy are slighter, more careless, and more indirect. But Pope's
are wilful, premeditated, with malice aforethought; and his falsehoods
wear a more malignant air, because they frequently concern truth
speculative, and are therefore presumably more deliberate in their
origin, and more influential in the result. It is precisely this part
of Pope's errors that would prove most perplexing to the unlearned
student. Beyond a doubt the 'Essay on Man' would, in virtue of its
subject, prove the most attractive to a laboring man of all Pope's
writings, as most of all promising a glimpse into a world of permanence
and of mysterious grandeur, and having an interest, therefore,
transcendent to any that could be derived from the fleeting aspects
of manners or social conventionalisms, though illuminated and vivified
by satire. _Here_ would be the most advantageous and _remunerative_
station to take for one who should undertake a formal exposure of
Pope's hollow-heartedness; that is, it would most commensurately reward
the pains and difficulties of such an investigation. But it would be
too long a task for this situation, and it would be too polemic. It
would move through a jungle of controversies. For, to quote a remark
which I once made myself in print, the 'Essay on Man' in one point
resembles some doubtful inscriptions in ancient forms of Oriental
languages, which, being made up elliptically of mere consonants, can
be read into very different senses according to the different sets of
vowels which the particular reader may choose to interpolate. According
to the choice of the interpreter, it may be read into a loyal or a
treasonable meaning. Instead of this I prefer, as more amusing, as
less elaborate, and as briefer, to expose a few of Pope's _personal_
falsehoods, and falsehoods as to the notorieties of _fact_. Truths
speculative oftentimes, drives its roots into depth so dark, that the
falsifications to which it is liable, though detected, cannot always
be exposed to the light of day--the result is known, but not therefore
seen. Truth personal, on the other hand, may be easily made to confront
its falsifier, not with refutation only, but with the visible _shame_
of refutation. Such sharoe would settle upon _every_ page of Pope's
satires and moral epistles, oftentimes upon every couplet, if any
censor, armed with an adequate knowledge of the facts, were to prosecute
the inquest. Apd the general impression from such an inquest would be,
that Pope never delineated a character, nor uttered a sentiment, nor
breathed an aspiration, which he, would not willingly have recast,
have retracted, have abjured or trampled under foot with the curses
assigned to heresy, if by sueh an act he could have added a hue of
brilliancy to his coloring, or a new depth to his shadows. There is
nothing he would not have sacrificed, not the most solemn of his
opinions, nor the most pathetic memorial from his personal experiences,
in return for a sufficient consideration, which consideration meant
always with _him_ poetic effect. It is not, as too commonly is believed,
that he was reckless of other people's feelings; so far from _that_,
he had a morbid _facility_ in his kindness; and in cases where he had
no reason to suspect any lurking hostility, he showed even a paralytic
benignity. But, simply and constitutionally, he was incapable of a
sincere thought or a sincere emotion. Nothing that ever he uttered,
were it even a prayer to God, but he had a fancy for reading it
backwards. And he was evermore false, not as loving or preferring
falsehood, but as one who could not in his heart perceive much real
difference between what people affected to call falsehood and what
they affected to call truth. Volumes might be filled with illustrations;
I content myself with three or four.

I. Pope felt _intellectually_ that it was philosophic, and also that
it wore an air of nobility, _not_ to despise poverty. _Morally_,
however, he felt inversely: nature and the accidents of his life had
made it his necessity to despise nothing so heartily. If in any one
sentiment he ever was absolutely sincere, if there can be cited one
insulated case upon which he found it difficult to play the hypocrite,
it was in the case of that intense scorn with which he regarded poverty,
and all the painful circumstances that form the equipage of poverty.
To look at a pale, dejected fellow-creature creeping along the highway,
and to have reason for thinking that he has not tasted food since
yesterday--what a pang would such a sight, accompanied by such a
thought, inflict upon many a million of benign human hearts! But in
Pope, left to his spontaneous nature, such a sight and such a thought
would have moved only fits of laughter. Not that he would have refused
the poor creature a shilling, but still he would have laughed. For
hunger, and cold, and poverty, appeared to _him_ only in the light of
drolleries, and too generally of scoundrelisms. Still he was aware
that some caution was requisite in giving public expression to such
feelings. Accordingly, when he came forward in gala-dress as a
philosopher, he assumed the serene air of one upon whom all such idle
distinctions as rich and poor were literally thrown away. But watch
him: follow his steps for a few minutes, and the deep realities of his
nature will unmask themselves. For example, in the first book of the
'Dunciad' he has occasion to mention Dennis:--

'And all the mighty mad in Dennis raged.'

Upon this line (the 106th) of the text he hangs a note, in the course
of which he quotes a few sentences about Dennis from Theobald. One of
these begins thus: 'Did we really know how much this poor man suffers
by being contradicted,' &c.; upon which Pope thinks proper to
intercalate the following pathetic parenthesis in italics: _I wish
that reflection on POVERTY had been spared._' How amiable! how pretty!
Could Joseph Surface have more dexterously _improved_ the occasion:
'The man that disparages poverty, is a man that--' &c. It is manifest,
however, at a glance, that this virtuous indignation is altogether
misplaced; for '_poor_' in the quotation from Theobald has no reference
whatever to _poverty_ as the antithesis to _wealth_. What a pity that
a whole phial of such excellent scenical morality should thus have
been uncorked and poured out upon the wrong man and the wrong occasion!
Really, this unhappy blunder extorts from me as many tears of laughter
as ever poverty extorted from Pope. Meantime, reader, watch what
follows. Wounded so deeply in his feelings by this constrained homage
to poverty, Pope finds himself unable to resettle the equilibrium in
his nervous system until he has taken out his revenge by an extra
kicking administered to some old mendicant or vagrant lying in a ditch.

At line 106 comes the flourish about Dennis's poverty. Just nine lines
ahead, keeping close as a policeman upon the heels' of a thief, you
come up with Pope in the very act of maltreating Gibber, upon no motive
or pretence whatever, small or great, but that he (the said Gibber)
was guilty of poverty. Pope had detected him--and this is Pope's own
account of the assault--in an overt act of poverty. He deposes, as if
it were an ample justification of his own violence, that Gibber had
been caught in the very act--not of supping meanly, coarsely, vulgarly,
as upon tripe, for instance, or other offal--but absolutely in the act
of not supping at all!

'Swearing and _supperless_ the hero sate.'

Here one is irresistibly reminded of the old story about the cat who
was transformed into a princess: she played the _role_ with admirable
decorum, until one day a mouse ran across the floor of the royal saloon,
when immediately the old instinct and the hereditary hatred proved too
much for the artificial nature, and her highness vanished over a
six-barred gate in a furious mouse-chase. Pope, treading in the steps
of this model, fancies himself reconciled to poverty. Poverty, however,
suddenly presents herself, not as a high poetic abstraction, but in
that one of her many shapes which to Pope had always seemed the most
comic as well as the most hateful. Instantly Pope's ancient malice is
rekindled; and in line 115 we find him assaulting that very calamity
under one name, which under another, at line 106, he had treated with
an ostentatious superfluity of indulgence.

II. I have already noticed that some of Pope's most pointed examples
which he presents to you as drawn from his own experience of life, are
in fact due to jest-books; and some (offered as facts) are pure coinages
of his own brain. When he makes his miser at the last gasp so tenacious
of the worldly rights then slipping from his grasp as that he refuses
to resign a particular manor, Pope forgot that even a jest-book must
govern its jokes by some regard to the realities of life, and that
amongst these realities is the very nature and operation of a will.
A miser is not, therefore, a fool; and he knows that no possible
testamentary abdication of an estate disturbs his own absolute command
over it so long as he lives, or bars his power of revoking the bequest.
The moral instruction is in this case so poor, that no reader cares
much upon what sort of foundation the story itself rests. For such a
story a lie may be a decent basis. True; but not so senseless a lie.
If the old miser was delirious, there is an end of his responsibilities;
and nobody has a right to draw upon _him_ for moral lessons or warnings.
If he was _not_ delirirous, the case could not have happened. Modelled
in the same spirit are all Pope's pretended portraitures of women; and
the more they ought to have been true, as professing to be studies
from life, the more atrociously they are false, and false in the
transcendent sense of being impossible. Heaps of contradiction, or of
revolting extravagance, do not verify themselves to our loathing
incredulity because the artist chooses to come forward with his arms
akimbo, saying angrily, 'But I tell you, sir, these are _not_
fancy-pieces! These ladies whom I have here lampooned are familiarly
known to me--they are my particular friends. I see them every day in
the undiess of confiding friendship. They betray all their foibles to
me in the certainty that I shall take no advantage of their candor;
and will you, coming a century later, presume to dispute the fidelity
or the value of my contemporary portraits?' Yes, and upon these two
grounds: first (as to the fidelity), that the pretended portraits are
delineations of impossible people; and secondly (as to the value),
that, if after all they could be sworn to as copies faithful to the
originals, not the less are they to be repelled as abnormal, and so
far beyond the intelligibilities of nature as practically to mean
nothing, neither teaching nor warning. The two Duchesses of Marlborough,
for instance, Sarah and Henrietta, are atrocious caricatures, and
constructed on the desperate principle of catching at a momentary stare
or grin, by means of anarchy in the features imputed, and truculent
antithesis in the expression. Who does not feel that these are the
fierce pasquinades, and the coarse pasquinades, of some malignant
electioneering contest? Is there a line that breathes the simplicity
and single-heartedness of truth? Equal disgust settles upon every word
that Pope ever wrote against Lady Mary W. Montagu. Having once come
to hate her rancorously, and finding his hatred envenomed by the
consciousness that Lady Mary had long ceased to care two straws for
all the malice of all the wits in Christendom, Pope labored at his own
spite, filing it and burnishing it as a hand-polisher works at the the
blade of a scymitar. For years he had forgotten to ask after the
realities of nature as they existed in Lady Mary, and considered only
what had the best chance of stinging her profoundly. He looked out for
a 'raw' into which he might lay the lash; not seeking it in the real
woman, but generally in the nature and sensibilities of abstract woman.
Whatever seemed to disfigure the idea of womanhood, _that_, by
reiterated touches, he worked into his portraits of Lady Mary; and at
length, no doubt, he had altogether obliterated from his own remembrance
the true features of her whom he so much detested. On this class of
Pope's satiric sketches I do not, however, wish to linger, having
heretofore examined some of the more prominent cases with close
attention.

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