Theological Essays and Other Papers v2

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IV. Yet even this may not be the worst. Even below this deep perhaps
there opens a lower deep. I submit that, when a man is asked for a
specimen of the Agincourt French literature, he cannot safely produce
a specimen from a literature two hundred and fifty years younger without
some risk of facing a writ _de lunatico inquirendo_. Pompey the Pitiful
(or, if the reader is vexed at hearing him so called, let us call him,
with Lord Biron, in 'Love's Labor's Lost,' 'more than great, great
Pompey--Pompey the Huge') was not published, even in France, until
about two centuries and a quarter had elapsed from Agincourt. But, as
respects England, eighteen-penny Pompey was not revealed; the fulness
of time for his _avatar_ amongst us did not arrive until something
like two hundred and sixty years had winged their flight from Agincourt.
And yet Pope's doctrine had been that, in the conquest of France, we
English first met with the Prometheus that introduced us to the
knowledge of fire and intellectual arts. Is not this ghastly? Elsewhere,
indeed, Pope skulks away from his own doctrine, and talks of
'_correctness_' as the particular grace for which we were indebted to
France. But this will not do. In his own 'Art of Criticism,' about
verse 715, he describes 'us brave Britons' as incorrigibly rebellious
in that particular. We _have_ no correctness, it seems, nor ever had;
and therefore, except upon Sir Richard Blackmore's principle of stealing
a suit of clothes 'from a naked Pict,' it is hard to see how we need
to thank France for that which, as to us, has no existence. Then,
again, Pope acquiesced at other times in an opinion of his early
friends, that not Pompey, but himself, was the predestined patriarch
of 'correctness.' Walsh, who was a sublime old blockhead, suggested
to Pope that 'correctness' was the only tight-rope upon which a fresh
literary performer in England could henceforth dance with any advantage
of novelty; all other tight-ropes and slack-ropes of every description
having been preoccupied by elder funambulists. Both Walsh and Pope
forgot ever once to ask themselves what it was that they meant by
'correctness;' an idea that, in its application to France, Akenside
afterwards sternly ridiculed. Neither of the two _literati_ stopped
to consider whether it was correctness in thought, or metrical
correctness, or correctness in syntax and idiom; as to all of which,
by comparison with other poets, Pope is conspicuously deficient. But
no matter what they meant, or if they meant nothing at all. Unmeaning,
or in any case inconsistent, as this talk about 'correctness' may be,
we cannot allow Pope so to escape from his own hyperbolical absurdities.
It was not by a little pruning or weeding that France, according to
his original proposition, had bettered our native literature--it was
by genial incubation, by acts of vital creation. She, upon our crab-tree
cudgel of Agincourt, had engrafted her own peaches and apricots--our
sterile thorn France had inoculated with roses. English literature was
the Eve that, in the shape of a rib, had been abstracted from the side
of the slumbering Pompey--of unconscious Pompey the Huge. And all at
the small charge of eighteen-pence! O heavens, to think of _that!_ By
any possibility, that the cost, the total 'damage' of our English
literature should have been eighteen-pence!--that a shilling should
actually be coming to us out of half-a-crown!

'Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem.'

NOTES.

NOTE 1.

A similar instance of a craze beyond the bounds of perfect physical
sanity may be found in Dr. Arnold's nervous paroxysm of horror on
hearing St. Paul placed on a level with St. John the Evangelist.

NOTE 2.

And by the way, as to servants, a great man may offend in two ways:
either by treating his servants himself superciliously, or secondly,
which is quite reconcilable with the most paternal behavior on his own
part, by suffering them to treat the public superciliously. Accordingly,
all novelists who happen to have no acquaintance with the realities
of life as it now exists, especially therefore rustic Scotch novelists,
describe the servants of noblemen as 'insolent and pampered menials.'
But, on the contrary, at no houses whatever are persons of doubtful
appearance and anomalous costume, sure of more respectful attention
than at those of the great feudal aristocracy. At a merchant's or a
banker's house, it is odds but the porter or the footman will govern
himself in his behavior by his own private construction of the case,
which (as to foreigners) is pretty sure to be wrong. But in London,
at a nobleman's door, the servants show, by the readiness of their
civilities to all such questionable comers, that they have taken their
lessons from a higher source than their own inexperience or unlearned
fancies.

NOTE 3.

'_Cape of Storms_,' which should _primae facie_ be the Cape of Terrors.
But it bears a deep allegoric sense to the bold wrestler with such
terrors, that in English, and at length to all the world, this Cape
of Terrors has transfigured itself into the Cape of _Good Hope_.

NOTE 4.

'_Heraldic solemnities_'--
'Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare;
Since seldom coming in the long year set,
Like precious stones they thinly placed are,
Or captain jewels in the carcanet.'
_Shakspeare, 52d Sonnet_.

NOTE 5.

'_I give and I bequeath, old Euclio said_'--and the ridiculous story
of the dying epicure insisting upon having his luxurious dish brought
back to his death-bed (for why not? since at any rate, eating or not
eating, he was doomed to die) are amongst the lowest rubbish of
jest-books--having done duty for the Christian and the Pagan worlds
through a course of eighteen centuries. Not to linger upon the nursery
silliness that could swallow the legend of epicureanism surviving up
to the very brink of the grave, and when even the hypocrisy of _medical_
hope had ceased to flatter, what a cruel memento of the infirmity
charged upon himself was Pope preparing whilst he intended nothing
worse than a falsehood! He meant only to tell a lie; naturally, perhaps,
saying to himself, What's one lie more or less? And behold, if his
friends are to be believed, he was unconsciously writing a sort of
hieroglyphic epitaph for his own tomb-stone. Dr. Johnson's taste for
petty gossip was so keen, that I distrust all his anecdotes. That Pope
killed himself by potted lampreys, which he had dressed with his own
hands, I greatly doubt; but if anything inclines me to believe it,
chiefly it is the fury of his invectives against epicures and gluttons.
What most of all he attacked as a moralist was the particular vice
which most of all besieged him.

NOTE 6.

Upon this principle I doubt not that we should interpret the sayings
attributed to the seven wise men of Greece. If we regard them as
insulated aphorisms, they strike us all as mere impertinences; for by
what right is some one prudential admonition separarately illuminated
and left as a solemn legacy to all posterity in slight of others equally
cogent? For instance, _Meden agan_--nothing in excess--is a maxim not
to be neglected, but still not entitled to the exclusive homage which
is implied in its present acceptation. The mistake, meantime, I believe
to be, not in the Grecian pleiad of sages, but in ourselves, who have
falsely apprehended them. The man, for instance (Bias was it, or who?),
who left me this old saw about excess, did not mean to bias me in favor
of that one moral caution; this would have argued a craze in favor of
one element amongst many. What he meant was, to indicate the _radix_
out of which his particular system was expanded. It was the key-note
out of which, under the laws of thorough-bass, were generated the whole
chord and its affinities. Whilst the whole evolution of the system was
in lively remembrance, there needed no more than this short-hand memento
for recalling it. But now, when the lapse of time has left the little
maxim stranded on a shore of wrecks, naturally it happens that what
was in old days the keystone of an arch has come to be compounded with
its superfluous rubbish.

NOTE 7.

It is no matter of wonder or complaint that a paper written by a
correspondent a distance of four hundred miles, or something more,
from the press, requiring, therefore, a _diaulos_ of above eight hundred
miles for every letter and its answer, a distance which becomes strictly
infinite in the case when the correspondent sends no answer at all,
should exhibit some press errors. These, having now done their worst,
I will not vex the reader or the compositor by recalling. Only with
respect to one, viz., the word _genuine_, which is twice printed for
the true word _generic_, I make an exception, as it defeats the meaning
in a way that may have perplexed a painstaking reader. Such readers
are rare, and deserve encouragement. [The same _diaulos_ which Mr. De
Quincey laments is also the cause of his present paper appearing
incomplete. It will be resumed in the next number.--Ed.]

NOTE 8.

'_The two brilliant poets._' As regards Horace, it is scarcely worth
while to direct the reader's attention upon inconsistency of this
imaginary defiance to philosophic authority with his profession
elsewhere of allegiance to Epicurus; for had it even been possible to
direct the poet's own attention upon it, the same spirit of frank
simplicity which has converted his very cowardice, his unmitigated
cowardice (_relicta non bene parmula_), into one of those amiable and
winning frailties which, once having come to know it, on no account
could we consent to forego--would have reconciled us all by some
inimitable picturesqueness of candor to inconsistency the most shocking
as to the fulfilment of some great moral obligation; just as from the
brute restiveness of a word (Equotuticum), that positively would not
come into the harness of hexameter verse, he has extracted a gay,
laughing _alias_ (viz., '_versu quod dicere non est_'); a pleasantry
which is nowhere so well paralleled as by Southey's on the name of
Admiral Tchichakoff:--

'A name which you all must know very well,
Which nobody can speak, and nobody can spell.'

Vain would it be to fasten any blame upon a poet armed with such
heaven-born playfulness that upon a verbal defect he raises a triumph
of art, and upon a personal defect raises a perpetual memento of smiling
and affectionate forgiveness. We 'condone' his cowardice, to use
language of Doctors' Commons, many times over, before we know whether
he would have cared for our condonation; and protest our unanimous
belief, that, if he did run away from battle, he ran no faster than
a gentleman ought to run. In fact, his character would have wanted its
amiable unity had he _not_ been a coward, or had he _not_ been a rake.
Vain were it to level reproaches at _him_, for whom all reproaches
become only occasions of further and surplus honor. But, in fact, for
any serious purposes of Horace, philosophy was not wanted. Some slight
pretence of that kind served to throw a shade of pensiveness over his
convivial revels, and thus to rescue them from the taint of plebeian
grossness. So far, and no farther, a slight coloring of philosophy was
needed for his moral musings. But Pope's case is different. The moral
breathings of Horace are natural exhalations rising spontaneously from
the heart under the ordinary gleams of chance and change in the human
things that lay around him. But Pope is more ambitious. He is not
content with _borrowing_ from philosophy the grace of a passing sanction
or countersign, but undertakes to _lend_ her a systematic coherency
of development, and sometimes even a fundamental basis. In his
'Essay on Man,' his morals connect themselves with metaphysics. The
metaphysics had been gathered together in his chance eclectic rambles
amongst books of philosophy, such as Montaigne, Charron, and latterly
amongst the fossil rubbish and _debris_ of Bayle's Dictionary. Much
also had been suggested to his piercing intellect in conversation,
especially with Lord Bolingbroke; but not so exclusively by any means
with _him_ as the calumniators of Pope would have us suppose. Adopt
he did from all quarters, but Pope was not the man servilely to beg
or to steal. It was indispensable to his own comfort that he should
at least understand the meaning of what he took from others, though
seldom indeed he understood its wider relations, or pursued its ultimate
consequences. Hence came anguish and horror upon Pope in his latter
days, such as rarely can have visited any but the deathbed of some
memorable criminal. To have rejected the _verba magistri_ might seem
well, it might look promising, as all _real_ freedom is promising, for
the interests of truth; but he forgot that, in rejecting the master,
he had also rejected the doctrine--the guiding principle--the unity
of direction secured for the inquirer by the master's particular system
with its deep internal cohesion. Coming upon his own distracted choice
of principles from opposite angles and lines of direction, he found
that what once and under one aspect had seemed to him a guiding light,
and one of the buoys for narrowing the uncertainties of a difficult
navigation, absolutely under another aspect, differently approached
and differently associated, did the treacherous office of a _spanselled_
horse, as in past days upon the Cornish and the South Irish coast it
was employed--expressly for showing false signals, and leading right
amongst breakers. That _hortus siccus_ of pet notions, which had won
Pope's fancy in their insulated and separate existence, when brought
together as parts and elements of the same system in the elaborate and
haughty 'Essay on Man,' absolutely refused to cohere. No doctoring,
no darning, could disguise their essential inter-repulsion. Dismal
rents, chasms, hiatuses, gaped and grinned in a theory whose very
office and arrogant pretension had been to harmonize the dislocated
face of nature, and to do _that_ in the way of justification for God
which God had forgotten to do for himself. How if an enemy should come,
and fill up these ugly chasms with some poisonous fungus of a nature
to spread the dry rot through the main timbers of the vessel? And, in
fact, such an enemy _did_ come. This enemy spread dismay through Pope's
heart. Pope found himself suddenly shown up as an anti-social monster,
as an incendiary, as a disorganizer of man's most aspiring hopes. 'O
Heavens! What is to be done? what _can_ be done?' he cried out. 'When
I wrote that passage, which now seems so wicked, certainly I meant
something very good; or, if I didn't, at any rate I meant to mean it.'
The case was singular; if no friend of the author's could offer a
decent account of its meaning, to a certainty the author could _not_.
Luckily, however, there are two ways of filling up chasms; and
Warburton, who had reasons best known to himself for cultivating Pope's
favor, besides considerable practice during his youth in a special
pleader's office, took the desperate case in hand. He caulked the
chasms with philosophic oakum, he 'payed' them with dialectic pitch,
he sheathed them with copper and brass by means of audacious dogmatism
and insolent quibbles, until the enemy seemed to have been silenced,
and the vessel righted so far as to float. The result, however, as a
permanent result, was this--that the demurs which had once been raised
(however feebly pressed) against the poem, considered in the light of
a system compatible with religion, settled upon it permanently as a
sullen cloud of suspicion that a century has not availed to dissipate.

NOTE 9.

'_The most interesting person of the Alcibiades class._' But it is
thoroughly characteristic of Pope, that the one solitary trait in the
Duke's career which interested _him_, was the fact that a man so
familiar with voluptuous splendor should have died on a flock-bed
patched with straw. How advantageously does Dryden come forward on
this occasion! _He_, as Mr. Bayes, had some bitter wrongs to avenge;
and he was left at liberty to execute this revenge after his own heart,
for he survived the Duke by a dozen years. Yet he took no revenge at
all. _He_, with natural goodness and magnanimity, declined to kick the
dead lion. And in the memorable lines, all alive and trembling with
impassioned insight into the demoniac versatility of the Duke's
character, how generously does he forbear every expression of scorn,
and cover the man's frailties with a mantle of comprehensive apology,
and, in fact, the true apology, by gathering them together, one and
all, as the united results of some secret nympholepsy, or some sacred
Pythian inspiration:--

'Blest madman! that could every hour employ
In something new to wish or to enjoy;

Now all for rhyming, wenching, fiddling, drinking;
Beside ten thousand freaks that died in thinking'

Strangely enough, the only Duke of Buckingham that interested Pope was
not the Villiers that so profoundly interested Dryden and his own
generation, but in every sense a mock Duke of Buckingham, a pantomimic
duke, that is known only for having built a palace as fine as gilt
gingerbread, and for having built a pauper poem. Some time after the
death of the Villiers duke, and the consequent extinction of the title,
Sheffield, Lord Mulgrave, obtained a patent creating him, not Duke of
Buckingham, but by a pawnbroker's dodge, devised between himself and
his attorney, Duke of Buckingham_shire_; the ostensible reason for
which, as alleged by himself, was, that he apprehended some lurking
claim to the old title that might come forward to his own confusion
at a future time, and in that case he was ready with this demur: 'You
mistake, I am not _ham_, but ham_shire_.' Such was _his_ account of
the matter. Mine is different: I tell the reason thus. He had known
the Villiers of old, he knew well how that lubricated gladiator had
defied all the powers of Chancery and the Privy Council, for months
after months, once to get a 'grip' of him, or a hawk over him. It was
the old familiar case of trying to catch a pig (but in this instance
a wild boar of the forest) whose tail has been soaped. (See _Lord
Clarendon_, not his History but his Life.) What the Birmingham duke
therefore really feared was, that the worst room, the tawdry curtains,
the flock-bed, &c., were all a pyramid of lies; that the Villiers had
_not_ been thrown; had probably _not_ died at all; but was only 'trying
it on,' in readiness for a great demonstration against himself; and
that, in case the title of Buckingham were ever finally given away,
the Villiers would be heard clattering on horseback up the grand
staircase of the new-built Buckingham House, like the marble statue
in 'Don Juan,' with a double commission against the false duke and the
Government as joint-traders in stolen goods. But if Pope were callous
to the splendor of the true Buckingham, what was it that drew him to
the false one? Pope must have been well aware that, amongst all the
poetic triflers of the day, there was not one more ripe for the
'Dunciad.' Like the jaws of the hungry grave (_Acherontis avari_), the
'Dunciad' yawned for him, whilst yet only in dim conception as a remote
possibility. He was, besides, the most vain-glorious of men; and, being
anxious above all things to connect himself with the blood royal, he
had conceived the presumptuous thought of wooing Queen Anne (then the
unmarried Princess Anne). Being rejected, of course, rather than have
no connection at all with royalty, he transferred his courtship to a
young lady born on the wrong side of the blanket, namely, the daughter
of James II. by Miss Sedley. Her he married, and they reigned together
in great pomp over Buckingham House. But how should this have attracted
Pope? The fact, I fear is, that Pope admired him, in spite of his
verses, as a man rich and prosperous. One morning, in some of his own
verses, he lodged a compliment to the Duke as a poet and a critic:
immediately the Duke was down upon him with an answering salute of
twenty-one guns, and ever afterwards they were friends. But I repeat
that, in Pope's own judgment, nine out of ten who found their way into
that great _menagerie_ of the 'Dunciad,' had not by half so well
established their right of entrance as the Duke.

NOTE 10.

Even this is open to demur. The Roman literature during the main Punic
War with Hannibal, though unavoidably reached by some slight influence
from the literature of Greece, was rich in native power and raciness.
Left to itself, and less disturbed by direct imitation applied to
foreign models, the Roman literature would probably have taken a wider
compass, and fulfilled a nobler destiny.

NOTE 11.

'_Joan of Arc's execution_'--viz., not by any English, but virtually
by a French tribunal, as _now_, at last, is satisfactorily established
by the recent publication, at Paris, of the judicial process itself
in its full official records.

NOTE 12.

The notes are _now_ (_i. e._, in all modern editions) assigned to their
separate authors; though not always in a way to prevent doubts. For
instance, Roscoe's notes, except that they are always distinguished
by kindness and good sense, are indicated only by the _absence_ of any
distinguishing signature. But in the early editions great carelessness
prevailed as to this point, and, sometimes, intentional dissimulation.

NOTE 13.

Which was probably not of French origin. Thomas-a-Kempis, Gerson, and
others, have had the credit of it; but the point is still doubtful.
When I say that it was _extensively_ diffused, naturally I mean so far
as it was possible before the invention of printing. One generation
after Agincourt this invention was beginning to move, after which--that
is, in two generations--the multiplication of copies, and even of
separate editions and separate translations, ran beyond all power of
registration. It is one amongst the wonders of the world; and the
reason I have formerly explained. Froissart belongs to the courts of
England and of Burgundy much more than to that of France.

NOTE 14.

Hardi, it is scarcely necessary to mention; as he never became a _power_
even in France, and _out_ of France was quite unknown. He coincided
in point of time, I believe, most nearly with Francis Beaumont.

NOTE 15.

Italian, Spanish, and finally German poetry have in succession exercised
some slight influence, more or less, over our English poetry. But I
have formerly endeavored to show that it is something worse than a
mere historical blunder, that, in fact, it involves a gross
misconception and a confusion in the understanding, to suppose that
there ever has been what has been called a _French school_ in our
literature, unless it is supposed that the unimpassioned understanding,
or the understanding speaking' in a minor key of passion, is a French
invention.

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