Theological Essays and Other Papers v2

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Theological Essays and Other Papers v2

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My last paper on Pope has been taxed with exaggeration. This charge
comes from a London weekly journal (_The Leader_) distinguished by its
ability, by its hardihood of speculation, by its comprehensive candor,
but, in _my_ eyes, still more advantageously distinguished by its deep
sincerity. Such qualities give a special value to the courtesies of
that journal; and I in particular, as a literary man, have to thank
it for repeated instances of kindness the most indulgent on any occasion
which has brought up the mention of my name. Such qualities of necessity
give a corresponding value to its censures. And accordingly, as a point
of duty, I directed my attention immediately to _this_ censure. Whatever
was still unprinted I reviewed; and whatever struck me as open to
objection I removed. And if the result after all has been that I do
not altogether concur in the criticism of _The Leader_, the reason is
because, as upon re-examination it strikes me, in the worst cases Pope
has not left room for exaggeration. I do not see any actual
exaggeration, simply because I do not see that any exaggeration is
possible. But though I thus found myself unable sincerely to make the
sacrifice of my own opinion, another sacrifice of a different kind I
_have_ made, viz., that of half my paper. I cancelled one half--viz.,
that half which was occupied with cases in Pope of disingenuousness,
and perhaps of moral falsehood or collusion with other people's
falsehood, but not of falsehood atrociously literal and conscious;
meaning thus to diminish by one half the penance of those who do not
like to see Pope assaulted, although forced by uneasiness to watch the
assault;--feeling with which I heartily sympathize; and meaning, on
the other hand, in justification of mylelf, to throw the reader's
attention more effectively, because more exclusively, upon such cases
of frantic and moonstruck falsehood as could allow no room for suspense
or mitigation of judgment. Of these I have selected two, one relating
to the Duke of Buckingham, and the other to the history and derivation
of English literature. Generally, I believe, that to a just appreciation
of Pope's falseness, levity, and self-contradiction, it is almost
essential that a reader should have studied him with the purpose of
becoming his editor. This at one time was my own purpose; and thus it
was that I became acquainted with qualities prevailing in Pope which,
in the midst of my great admiration for him, would have made such a
purpose difficult of execution. For in the relation between author and
editor, any harshness of reproach on the part of the latter, or any
expression of alienation and imperfect sympathy, seems unbecoming in
one who has spontaneously assumed the office of a _patronus_ to a
_client_, and are uniformly painful to the reader. On this account it
is that the late Mr. Roscoe figures amongst all editors of Pope as by
far the most agreeable. He has a just tenderness for the memory and
merits of the great writer whom he undertakes to edit; this feeling
keeps his annotations clear from the petulance of Joseph Warton and
the malice of Bowles; whilst, not having happened to see Pope's errors
in the same light as myself, he suffers from no conflict between his
natural indulgence to intellectual splendor and his conscientious
reverence for truth.

But if the reader is shocked with Pope's false reading of phenomena,
where not the circumstances so much as the construction of the
circumstances may be challenged, what must he think of those cases in
which downright facts, and incidents the most notorious, have been
outrageously falsified only in obedience to a vulgar craving for effect
in the dramatic situations, or by way of pointing a moral for the
stimulation of torpid sensibilities? Take, for instance, the death of
the second Villiers, Duke of Buckingham--a story which, in Pope's
version of it, has travelled into a popularity that may be called
national; and yet, the whole is one tissue of falsehoods--and of
falsehoods that must have been known for such by Pope not less than
to most of his contemporary readers. Suppose them _not_ known, and the
whole must have wanted all natural interest. For this interest lay in
the Duke's character, in his superb accomplishments and natural
advantages, in his fine person, in his vast wealth, and in the admirable
versatility of his intellectual powers, which made him alternately the
idol and the terror of all circles that he approached, which caused
Lord Clarendon to tremble with impotent malice in his chancellor's
robes, and Dry den to shiver with panic under his laureate crowns.
Now, wherever these features of the case were _not_ known, the story
was no more than any ordinary death arising out of a fox-chase. But
those to whom they _were_ known must, at the same time, have known the
audacious falsehood which disfigures the story in Pope's way of telling
it. _Without_ the personal interest, the incidents were nothing; and
_with_ that interest, at starting, Pope's romance must have defeated
itself by its fabulous coloring. Let me recall to the reader the
principal lines in this famous description:--

'In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half hung,
The floors of plaster and the walls of dung,
On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw,
With tape-tied curtains never meant to draw,
The George and Garter dangling from that bed
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,
Great Villiers lies! Alas! how changed from him,
That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim,
Gallant and gay in Cliveden's proud alcove,
The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love;
_There_, victor of his health, of fortune, friends,
And fame, the lord of useless thousands ends.'

Without stopping to examine these famous lines as to thought and
expression (both of which are scandalously vicious), what I wish the
reader to remark is, the one pervading falsehood which connects them.
Wherefore this minute and purely fanciful description of the road-side
_cabaret_, with its bedroom and bed? Wherefore this impertinent and
also fraudulent circumstantiality? It is, as Pope would tell you, for
the sake of impressing with more vivacity the abject poverty to which
the Duke's follies had brought him. The wretched bed, for instance,
is meant to be the exponent of the empty purse which could purchase
no better. And, for fear that you might miss this construction of the
passage, Pope himself tells you, in a prose note, that the Duke 'died
in a remote inn in Yorkshire, _reduced to the utmost misery_.' Being
engaged in the business of dying, it could hardly be expected that the
Duke should be particularly happy. But what Pope means you to understand
by 'misery' is _poverty_; the prose note simply reiterates the words,
'victor of _fortune_,' in the text. Now, had the truth been really so,
what moral would such a story exemplify beyond the vulgar one of
pecuniary improvidence? And yet surely this was not the cause of the
Duke's being thrown from his horse. Meantime, Pope well knew that the
whole was a ridiculous fable. The Duke had the misfortune to be fatally
injured in a fox-chase. In such an extremity, naturally, his servants
carry him into the house nearest at hand, which happens to be an
alehouse--not 'the worst,' since there was no other; nor was it possible
that, to a man of his distinction, once the lord-lieutenant of that
very East Riding, any room would be offered worse than the very best
that contained a bed. In these dreadful circumstances, it is not easy
to measure the levity which can linger upon the description of such
exquisite impertinences as the housewifely defects of the walls, the
curtains, the flock-bed, &c. But Pope was at his wit's end for a
striking falsehood. He needed for a momentary effect some tale of a
great lord, once fabulously rich, who had not left himself the price
of a halter or of a pauper's bed. And thus, for the sake of extorting
a stare of wonderment from a mob of gaping readers, he did not scruple
to give birth and currency to the grossest of legendary lies. The
Duke's death happened a few months before Pope's birth. But the last
of the Villiers family that wore a ducal coronet was far too memorable
a person to have died under the cloud of obscurity which Pope's
representation presumes. He was the most interesting person of the
Alcibiades class [Footnote 9] that perhaps ever existed; and Pope's
mendacious story found acceptance only amongst an after-generation
unacquainted with the realities of the case. There was not so much as
a popular rumor to countenance Pope. The story was a pure, gratuitous
invention of his own. Even at the time of his death, the Duke of
Buckingham was generally reputed to have sixty thousand per annum, and
chiefly from land; an income at that period absolutely without precedent
or parallel in Europe. In this there might be some exaggeration, as
usually there _is_ in such cases. But the 'Fairfax Papers' have recently
made it manifest that Pope's tale was the wildest of fictions. The
Duke of Buckingham had, to some extent, suffered from his loyalty to
the Crown, though apparently sheltered from the main fury of the storm
by the interest of his Presbyterian father-in-law; and in his own
person he had at one time been carelessly profuse. But all this was
nothing. The sting of Pope's story requires him to have been a pauper;
and yet--O heaven and incredulous earth!--a pauper hunting upon
blood-horses, in a star and garter, and perhaps in a collar of SS! The
plain, historical truth, meanwhile, survives, that this pauper was
simply the richest man in Christendom; and that, except Aladdin (Oh,
yes; always except Aladdin of the Arabian Nights!) there never had
been a richer. And thus collapses the whole fable, like a soap-bubble
punctured by a surgeon's probe.

II. Yet even this specimen of Pope's propensity to falsehood is far
from being the worst. Here were facts scandalously distorted. Falsehoods
they were; but, if it had pleased God, they might have been truths.
Next, however, comes a fiction so maniacally gross, so incoherent, and
so rife with internal contradictions, as to involve its own exposure,
literally shrinking from its own intelligible enunciation, burrowing
in sentences kept aloof from the text, and calling upon foot-notes to
cover it. The case will speak for itself. Pope had undertaken to
translate the well-known epistle of Horace to Augustus Caesar; not
literally, but upon the principle of adapting it to a modern and English
treatment of its topics. Caesar, upon this system, becomes George the
Second--a very strange sort of Caesar; and Pope is supposed to have
been laughing at him, which may be the color that Pope gave to the
travesty amongst his private circle; otherwise there is nothing in the
expressions to sustain such a construction. Rome, with a little more
propriety, masquerades as England, and France as Greece, or, more
strictly, as Athens. Now, by such a transformation, already from the
very beginning Pope was preparing for himself a dire necessity of
falsehood. And he must have known it. Once launched upon such a course,
he became pledged and committed to all the difficulties which it might
impose. Desperate necessities would arise, from which nothing but
desperate lying and hard swearing could extricate him. The impossibility
of carrying through the parallel by means of _genuine_ correspondences
threw him for his sole resource upon such as were extravagantly
spurious; and apparently he had made up his mind to cut his way through
the ice, though all the truths that ever were embattled against Baron
Munchausen should oppose his advance. Accordingly about the middle of
the Epistle, a dilemma occurs from which no escape or deliverance is
possible, except by an almighty falsehood. Take the leap Pope must,
or else he must turn back when half-way through. Horace had occasion
to observe that, after Rome had made a conquest of Greece by force of
arms, captive Greece retaliated upon her conqueror by another kind of
victory, namely, by that of arts: [Footnote 10]--

'Graecia capta ferum ietorera cepit, et artes
Intulit agresti Latio.'

Now, in the corresponding case (as Pope had arranged it) between England
and France, the parallel certainly held good as far as the military
conquest. England, it was undeniable, had conquered France in that
sense, as completely as ever Rome had conquered Greece or Macedon. Two
English kings had seated themselves in succession upon the throne of
France--one virtually, one formally. So far all was tight, and held
water. Nothing could disturb _that_ part of the case. But next came
the retaliatory conquest, by means of arts and letters. How was this
to be dealt with? What shadow or dream of a correspondency could be
made out _there_? What impudence could face _that_? Already, in Pope's
ears, sounded the trumpet of recall; and Pope mused a, little: but
'No,' he said in effect, 'I will not turn back. Why should I? It is
but one astounding falsehood that is wanted to set me free.' I will
venture to say that Mendez Pinto, the Portuguese liar, that Sir John
Mandeville, the traveller, that Baron Munchausen, the most philosophic
of bold adventurers into the back settlements of lying, never soared
into such an aerial bounce, never cleared such a rasper of a fence,
as did Pope on this occasion. He boldly took it upon his honor and
credit that our English armies, in the times of Agincourt and the
Regent Bedford, found in France a real, full-grown French literature,
packed it up in their baggage-wagons, and brought it home to England.
The passage from Horace, part of which has been cited above, stands
thus in the translation of Pope:--

'We conquered France, but felt our captive's charms--
Her arts victorious triumphed o'er our arms;
Britain to soft refinements less a foe,
Wit grew polite, and numbers learned to flow.'

Ten years then, before Joan of Arc's execution, [Footnote 11] viz.,
about 1420 (if we are to believe Pope), or even fifteen years, France
had a great domestic literature; and this unknown literature has
actually furnished a basis to our own. Let us understand clearly what
it is that Pope means to assert. For it is no easy matter to do that
where a man dodges behind texts and notes, and shuffles between verse
and prose, mystifying the reader, and designing to do so. Under the
torture of cross-examination let us force Pope to explain what
literature _that_ is which, having glorified France, became the
venerable mother of a fine English literature in an early stage of the
fifteenth century? The reader, perhaps, fancies that possibly Pope may
have expressed himself erroneously only from being a little hurried
or a little confused. Not at all. I know my man better, perhaps, than
the reader does; and I know that he is trying to hoax us. He is not
confused himself, but is bent upon confusing _us_; and I am bent upon
preventing him. And, therefore, again I ask sternly, What literature
is this which very early in the fifteenth century, as early as
Agincourt, we English found prospering in France, and which, for the
benefit of the English intellect, such men as Ancient Pistol, Nym,
Bardolph, Fluellen, Capt. Macmorris, Jamy, and other well-known literati
in the army of Henry V., transplanted (or, 'as the wise it call,'
_conveyed_) to England? Agincourt was fought in 1415; exactly four
centuries before Waterloo. That was the beginning of our domination
in France; and soon after the middle of that same fifteenth century,
viz., about 1452, our domination was at an end. During that interval,
therefore, it must have been, then, or not at all, that this great
intellectual revolution worked by France upon England was begun and
completed. Naturally, at this point, the most submissive and
sycophantish of Pope's friends would feel moved by the devil of
curiosity, if not absolutely by the devil of suspicion, humbly to ask
for a name or two, just as a specimen, from this great host of
Anglo-Gallic wits. Pope felt (and groaned as he felt) that so reasonable
a demand could not be evaded. 'This comes of telling lies,' must have
been his bitter reflection: 'one lie makes a necessity for another.'
However, he reflected that this second lie need not be introduced into
the text, where it would have the fatal effect of blowing up the whole
bubble: it might be hidden away in a foot-note. Not one person in
twenty would read it, and he that did might easily suppose the note
to be some unauthorized impertinence of a foolish commentator. Secretly
therefore, silently, stealthily--so as to draw as little attention
as possible--Pope introduced into a note his wicked little brazen
solution of his own wicked and brazen conundrum. France, such was the
proposition, had worked a miracle upon English ground; as if with some
magician's rod, she had called up spawn innumerable of authors, lyric,
epic, dramatic, pastoral, each after his kind. But by whom had France
moved in this creation as the chief demi-urgus? By whom, Mr. Pope?
Name, name, Mr. Pope! 'Ay,' we must suppose the unhappy man to reply,
'that's the very question which I was going to answer, if you wouldn't
be so violent.' 'Well, answer it then. Take your own time, but answer;
for we don't mean to be put off without some kind of answer.' 'Listen,
then,' said Pope, 'and I'll whisper it into your ear; for it's a sort
of secret.' Now think, reader, of a _secret_ upon a matter like this,
which (if true at all) must be known to the antipodes. However, let
us have the secret. 'The secret,' replied Pope, 'is, that some time
in the reign of Charles the Second--when I won't be positive, but I'm
sure it was after the Restoration--three gentlemen wrote an
eighteen-penny pamphlet.' 'Good! And what were the gentlemen's names?'
'One was Edmund Waller, the poet; one was Mr. Go-dolphin; and the other
was Lord Dorset.' 'This trinity of wits, then, you say, Mr. Pope,
produced a mountain, price eighteen-pence, and this mountain produced
a mouse.' 'Oh, no! it was just the other way. They produced a mouse,
price eighteen-pence, and this mouse produced a mountain, viz., the
total English literature.' O day and night, but this is wondrous
strange! The total English literature--not the tottle only, but the
tottle of the whole, like an oak and the masts of some great amiral,
that once slept in an acorn--absolutely lying hid in an eighteen-penny
pamphlet! And what, now, might this pamphlet be about? Was it about
the curing of bacon, or the sublimer art of sowing moonshine broadcast?
It was, says Pope, if you _must_ know everything, a translation from
the French. And judiciously chosen; for it was the _worst_ (and surely
everybody must think it proper to keep back the _best_, until the
English had earned a right to such luxuries by showing a proper sense
of their value)--the _worst_ it was, and by very much the worst, of
all Corneille's dramas; and its name was 'Pompey.' Pompey, was it? And
so, then, from Pompey's loins we, the whole armies of English
_litterateurs_, grubs and eagles, are lineally descended. So says Pope.
So he _must_ say, In obedience to his own line of argument. And, this
being the case, one would be glad to have a look at Pompey. It is hard
upon us _literati_, that are the children of Pompey, not to have a
look at the author of our existence. But our chance of such a look is
small indeed. For Pompey, you are to understand, reader, never advanced
so far as to a second edition. That was a poor return on the part of
England for Pompey's services. And my too sceptical mind at one time
inclined to doubt even Pompey's _first_ edition; which was wrong, and
could have occurred only to a lover of paradoxes. For Warton (not Tom,
but Joe) had actually seen Pompey, and records his opinion of him,
which happened to be this: that Pompey was 'pitiful enough.' These are
Joe's own words. Still, I do not see that one witness establishes a
fact of this magnitude. A shade of doubt, therefore, continues to
linger over Pompey's very existence; and the upshot is, that Pompey
(not the great, but confessedly) the doubtful, eighteen-penny Pompey,
but, in any case, Pompey, 'the Pitiful,' is the Great overriding and
tutelary power, under whose inspiration and inaugurating impulse our
English literature has blossomed and ripened, root, stem, and branch,
through the life-struggles of five centuries, into its present colossal
proportions.

Here pause, reader, and look back upon the separate reticulations--so
as, if possible, to connect them--in this network of hideous
extravagance; where as elsewhere it happens, that one villany, hides
another, and that the mere depth of the umbrage spread by fraudulent
mystifications is the very cause which conceals the extent of those
mystifications. Contemplated in a languid mood, or without original
interest in the subject, that enormity of falsehood fails to strike,
which, under circumstances personally interesting, would seem absolutely
incredible. The outrage upon the intellect actually obscures and
withdraws the outrage upon the facts. And, inversely, the affronts to
historical accuracy obscure the affronts to good sense. Look steadily
for a moment at the three points in the array of impeachments :--

I. In the Red-rose invasion of France, Pope assumes, as a matter of
notoriety, that the English invading force went from a land of
semi-barbarism to a land of literature and refinement: the simple fact
being so conspicuously the other way, that, whilst France had no
literature at all, consequently _could_ have nothing to give (there
being no book extensively diffused in the France of that period, except
the 'De Imitatione Christi,') [Footnote 13] England, on the other hand,
had so bright a jewel to offer, that to this hour the whole of
Christendom has not matched it or approached it. Even at present, in
the case so often supposed, that a man were _marooned_, that is,
confined (as regarded his residence) to one desert island, and marooned
also as to books, confined I mean (as regarded his reading) to one
sole book, his choice (if he read English) would probably oscillate
between Shakspeare and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Now, the Canterbury
Tales had been finished about thirty-five years before Agincourt; so
exquisitely false, even in this point, is Pope's account. Against the
_nothing_ of beggarly France was even then to be set a work which _has_
not been rivalled, and probably _will_ not be rivalled, on our planet.

II. In this comparison of the France and England then existing,
historically Pope betrays an ignorance which is humiliating. He speaks
of France as if that name, of course, covered the same states and
provinces that it now covers. But take away from the France of this
day the parts then possessed by Burgundy--take away Alsace, and
Lorraine, and Franche Compte--take away the alien territories adjacent
to Spain and Navarre--take away Avignon, &c.--take away the extensive
duchy of Britanny, &c.--and what remains of that which constituted the
France of Pope's day? But even that which _did_ remain had no cohesion
or unity as regarded any expanded sentiment of nationality, or the
possibilities of a common literature. The moral anachronisms of Pope
in this case are absolutely frightful--and the physical anachronisms
of Pope also; for the simple want of roads, by intercepting all peaceful
and pleasurable intercourse, must have intercepted all growth of
nationality, unless when a rare community of selfish interest happened
to arise, as when the whole was threatened with conquest or with famine
through foreign aggression upon a part.

III. That particular section of the French literature through which,
Pope pretends to think (for think he does _not_) that France absolutely
created our own, was the drama. Eighteen-penny Pompey belongs to this
section. Now, most unhappily, these two broad facts are emblazoned
beyond all power of impudence to darken them. The first is, that our
English drama was closing,' or actually _had_ closed, just about the
time when the French was opening. Shakspeare notoriously died in 1616,
when Corneille [Footnote 14] was yet a child of ten, and the last of
Shakspeare's great contemporary dramatists died, according to my
remembrance, in 1636; and, in 1635, one year earlier, was first
performed the first successful tragedy (the 'Medea') of Corneille.
About seven or eight years after _that_, the Puritans officially
suppressed the English drama by suppressing the theatres. At the opening
of the Parliamentary war, the elder (that is, the immortal) English
drama had finished its career. But Racine, the chief pillar of the
French, did not begin until Cromwell was dead and gone, and Charles
II. was restored. So, here we have the Asopian fable of the lamb
troubling the waters for the wolf; or, in the Greek proverb, _ano
potamon_. The other fact is, that, as no section whatever of the French
literature has ever availed to influence, or in the slightest degree
to modify, our own, it happens that the dramatic section in particular,
which Pope insists on as the galvanizing force operating upon our
seers, has been in the most signal repulsion to our own. All the other
sections have been simply inert and neutral; but the drama has ever
been in murderous antagonism to every principle and agency by which
our own lives and moves. [Footnote 15] And to make this outrage upon
truth and sense even more outrageous, Pope had not the excuse of those
effeminate critics, sometimes found amongst ourselves, who recognise
no special divinity in our own drama; _that_ would have been one great
crime the more, but it would have been one inconsistency the less. For
Pope had been amongst the earliest editors of Shakspeare; he had written
a memorable preface to this edition. The edition, it is true, was
shocking; and if the preface even was disfigured by concessions to a
feeble system of dramatic criticism, rhetorically it was brilliant
with the expression of a genuine enthusiasm as to Shakspeare, and a
true sympathy with his colossal power.

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