Part 53

In the account which Pope gave to Caryll of the first night of Cato he said that "all the foolish industry possible had been used to make it a party play," and complained that "the prologue writer was clapped into a stanch whig, sore against his will, at almost every two lines." He might be anxious to persuade his jacobite correspondent that he had not been abetting a whig manifesto, and might pretend that he was annoyed at the construction put upon the Prologue, but his verses were chiefly devoted to enforcing the political doctrine of the play, and he must deliberately have laid himself out to catch the applause of its friends. His management advanced his fortunes. Windsor Forest procured him the acquaintance and patronage of the tory leaders. Swift recommended the poem to Stella on March 9, 1713, and in November he was heard by Dr. Kennet "instructing a young nobleman that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope, a papist, who had begun a translation of Homer into English verse, for which he must have them all subscribe, 'for,' says he, 'the author shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for him.'" The other magnates of the faction joined with Swift in befriending him. In those heated times a Roman Catholic who had won over one party to his interests, by proclaiming his jacobite bias in verse, would naturally have fallen under the ban of their opponents; but his standing sponsor for the whig play, and the relations he maintained with whig authors, kept the whigs from renouncing him. To his art in attracting notice to his poetry through his politics, and in combining the suffrages of embittered political antagonists, he owed the unexampled success of the Homer subscription, which secured his pecuniary independence. He had served both masters by turns, though in unequal degrees, and then unreasonably complained to Caryll that some people called him a whig, and others called him a tory. He disclaimed being either. He talked of his abhorrence of party violence, and propounded his principles in dark unmeaning generalities from which nothing can be gathered, except that he wished to avoid being held responsible for any opinions whatever. He did not take up the position that a purely literary undertaking was independent of politics. The moment the tory cause declined he pleaded his neutrality, and seemed to imagine that he could claim the support of all parties on the ground that he adhered to none. The less wary patron who bespoke Windsor Forest had to suffer for his jacobite zeal. He was arrested on Sept. 21, 1715, and remained in the Tower till Feb. 8, 1717. Bolingbroke and Oxford were impeached, and the selfish bargain they had brought about by dishonourable means, that they might prolong their rule, annihilated their power for ever.

"A person," says Warton, "of no small rank has informed me, that Mr. Addison was inexpressibly chagrined at the noble conclusion of Windsor Forest, both as a politician and as a poet,--as a politician, because it so highly celebrated that treaty of peace which he deemed so pernicious to the liberties of Europe; and as a poet, because he was deeply conscious that his own Campaign, that gazette in rhyme, contained no strokes of such genuine and sublime poetry." This is one of those plausible imputations which enemies propagate on the evidence of their own suspicions, and which therefore require to be substantiated by unexceptionable testimony. Warton had nothing better to adduce in support of the credibility of his informant than the irrelevant circumstance that he was "a person of no small rank." The description of the witness declares his incompetence. It is not pretended that the "person of no small rank" was intimate with Addison, or had any authentic means of ascertaining his sentiments, and they are certainly misrepresented by the assertion that he could not endure poetical panegyrics on a Peace he disapproved, for in the Spectator of Oct. 30, 1712, he wrote up Tickell's laudatory verses, and "hoped his poem would meet with such a reward from its patrons as so noble a performance deserved." There is not a party word added to extenuate the praise; a tory might have endorsed the essay. Intolerance and "inexpressible chagrin" were not at any time characteristics of Addison.

Tickell's Prospect of Peace went through six editions, and to judge by the sale was more popular than Windsor Forest, which was published four months later. The greater success of the far inferior poem was doubtless owing to the eulogium in the Spectator. Pope joined in applauding Tickell's work. He said that it contained "several most poetical images, and fine pieces of painting," he specified certain "strokes of mastery," and he especially commended the versification. His too liberal praise may have been influenced by the couplet in which Tickell exclaimed,

Like the young spreading laurel, Pope! thy name Shoots up with strength and rises into fame.

Nearly the whole of the poem is in an equally dreary style, and this dull mediocrity was not attained without numerous imitations of ancient and modern authors. The insipidity did not exclude extravagance; for both poetry and patriotism were thought to be displayed by a nonsensical exaggeration of British beauty, valour, and power.

Windsor Forest is not free from flat passages, inflation of sentiment, and false and puerile thoughts. Pope mixed up in it the beauties of his manlier period with the vices of his early style. No writer clung more tenaciously to the lifeless phantoms of paganism, nor applied the hereditary common-places in a more servile manner. Liberty is "Britannia's goddess;" the sun is "Phoebus' fiery car;" the sea is "Neptune's self;" the harvest is "Ceres' gifts;" the orchard is "Pomona crowned with fruits;" the ground is "painted by blushing Flora; "and the flocks on the hills are attended by Pan. This last personage leaves his innocent pastoral employment to chase, with evil intentions, "a rural nymph" who calls on "Father Thames" for aid. Father Thames is deaf or indifferent, and Pan is about to clutch her when at her own request she is dissolved into a river. Before her transformation she was one of the "buskined virgins" of Diana, what time the goddess forsook "Cynthus' top" for Windsor, and was often seen roving there over the "airy wastes." There was no occasion now to envy "Arcadia the immortal huntress and her virgin train," since Windsor could boast

As bright a goddess, and as chaste a queen,

and the poet proceeds to complete the comparison between Diana and Queen Anne,--between the virgin huntress, and a prolific mother, who was ugly, corpulent, gouty, sluggish, a glutton and a tippler. Pope afterwards affected a disdain of royalty; he was ready enough to flatter it when he had his own ends to serve. He could not have devised a less felicitous compliment. Tickell's poem was specially praised in the Spectator for its freedom from the follies of "pagan theology." Addison laughed at the whole tiresome tribe of gods and goddesses, and, with good-humoured pleasantry, warned the versifiers, who were about to celebrate the Peace, against introducing "trifling antiquated fables unpardonable in a poet that was past sixteen." He laid stress upon the circumstance that in a panegyric, which should be distinguished for truth, "nothing could be more ridiculous than to have recourse to our Jupiters and Junos," and no incongruity of the kind could be more absurd than to couple Diana and Queen Anne. Windsor Forest was still in manuscript when Addison's essay appeared. Pope was not at the pains to re-cast his poem, but he must have recognised the force of the playful satire, and thenceforward he abjured mythological trash.

The passage on the death of Cowley exemplifies, in a short compass, the unskilful use to which Pope put the worn-out rags of antiquity:

O early lost! what tears the river shed, When the sad pomp along his banks was led! His drooping swans on ev'ry note expire, And on his willows hung each muse's lyre.

"The appropriate business of poetry," says Wordsworth, "her privilege, and her duty, is to treat of things not as they are, but as they appear; not as they exist in themselves, but as they seem to exist to the senses and passions." Since genuine emotions are often founded upon fancies, since thoughts are not always the true reflection of outward realities, poetasters, and even poets, have concluded that they might represent things neither as they are nor as they appear, might neglect nature altogether, and be unfaithful alike to the world of intelligence, and the world of matter. To this spurious class of invention belong the notions that a river, which had flowed for ages, was the tears of the river-god lamenting the newly-deceased Cowley, and that all the swans on the Thames died with grief on the day of his funeral. The mind refuses to admit such jejune and monstrous fictions among the illusions of imagination. The compound of mythological and biblical ideas in the fourth line has converted a pathetic incident in the Psalms into a cold and miserable conceit. The harp of the Jew was a reality; and when he wept over his captivity by the rivers of Babylon he hung up his harp in very truth because his broken spirit would not permit him to sing the Lord's song in a strange land. There is, on the contrary, only hollow pedantry in the pretence that non-existent muses hung up non-existent lyres on the willows of the Thames because Cowley was dead. The passage goes on in the same empty artificial strain:

Who now shall charm the shades, where Cowley strung His living harp, and lofty Denham sung? But hark! the groves rejoice, the forest rings! Are these revived?--or is it Granville sings?

It is an excellent remark of Bowles that there are some ideas which will only just bear touching. The earliest poems were sung, and singing became synonymous with poetical composition, but when a phrase, which is now a mere figure of speech, is expanded, and the groves are said to rejoice, and the forests to ring with the singing of Granville, the predominant effect produced by the metaphor is a sense of its falsity and grotesqueness. The picture called up is not that of a poet, but of a half-crazed opera singer. This sickly vein of counterfeit pastoral is continued, and we are told that the groves of Windsor are filled with the name of Mira, the subject of Lord Lansdowne's amatory verses, and that the Cupids tuned the lover's lyre in the shades.

The lines on Lord Lansdowne offend the more from the fulsomeness of the adulation. Pope said that "flattery turned his stomach," which meant that he could not endure his own vices in other people. He had emphatically satirised the sycophancy which estimated literary works by the rank of the author:

What woful stuff this madrigal would be In some starved hackney sonneteer, or me! But let a lord once own the happy lines, How the wit brightens! how the style refines! Before his sacred name flies ev'ry fault, And each exalted stanza teems with thought.

The "sacred name" of Lansdowne imparted genius to verse which would have been "woful stuff" in Dennis or Welsted. When Pope, in later years, called him "Granville the polite" he characterised him correctly; when, in Windsor Forest, he exalted him to the rank of a transcendent poet, he said what he could not believe. He outraged candour in prose as well as in verse. He wrote a sycophantic letter to Lord Lansdowne, boasting his freedom from the insincerity of his "fellow scribblers" who composed panegyrics "at random, and persuaded the next vain creature they could find that it was his own likeness." Pope vowed he had erred in the opposite direction, and had forborne to praise Lord Lansdowne up to the height of his deserts out of deference to his modesty. "Whereas others are offended if they have not more than justice done them, you would be displeased if you had so much. Therefore I may safely do you as much injury in my word as you do yourself in your own thoughts. I am so vain as to think I have shown you a favour in sparing your modesty, and you cannot but make me some return for prejudicing the truth to gratify you." Here was triple incense,--the original adulation, the protestation that it was inadequate, and the pretence that Lord Lansdowne, a man noted for vanity, was too modest to endure merited praise. Pope spoke more truth than he intended when he said that he had "prejudiced truth to gratify him."

"Who now reads Cowley?" asked Pope in 1737. The panegyric in Windsor Forest was an anachronism, and he might have asked the same question in 1713. Never was an equal reputation more ephemeral. While Cowley lived, and for a few years afterwards, the most cultivated minds in the kingdom called him the "great Cowley," the "incomparable Cowley," the "divine Cowley." When he died, Denham said that Death had

Plucked the fairest, sweetest flow'r That in the Muses' garden grew.

The herd of readers vied with men of letters in applauding him, as was shown by the sale of his works, and is implied in the couplet of Oldham:

One likes my verses, and commends each line, And swears that Cowley's are but dull to mine.

The wonder is not that he lost his pre-eminence, but that he ever obtained it. His poetry is a puzzle from its contradictory qualities. Some of his pieces have a gay facility which had not hitherto been rivalled, and the greater part are harsh, heavy and obscure. He loved to search for remote analogies, and his profusion of far-fetched similes are constantly of a kind which debase the subject they are intended to elevate and adorn. His language is incessantly pitched in a high, heroic key, and then sinks in the same, or the succeeding sentence, into the tamest, meanest phrases of colloquial prose. His verse in entire poems, as well as in single lilies and occasional passages, is remarkable for its tripping ease, and is more often rugged to such a degree that it is incredible how it could pass with him for verse at all. The faulty side in him predominates, and the general impression he leaves is that of dullness, laboured and negligent by turns. He did not owe the whole of his popularity to his real abilities, and the bad taste of his age. He was a conspicuous adherent of the Stuarts, and the cavaliers adopted his works out of compliment to his politics. The grand funeral procession, commemorated in Windsor Forest, was a tribute paid to him by a party, because he united the fame of a forward royalist to the celebrity of an author. In a generation when authors and royalists were both dissolute, his writings had at least the merit of being untainted by the prevailing vice. Pope, describing the infidelity and debauchery of the Restoration era, exclaims,

Unhappy Dryden! in all Charles's days, Roscommon only boasts unspotted bays.

He might have remembered Milton if he overlooked Cowley, who was nevertheless a far greater poet than Roscommon. The one had gleams of genius, and the other had none. The contemporaries of Cowley had not been blind to the moral merits of his productions. "I cannot," says Sir John Denham, "but mention with honour my friend Mr. Cowley, who was the first who of late offered to redeem poesy from that slavery wherein this depraved age has prostituted her to all imaginable uncleanness." His request in his will, that his compositions, printed and manuscript, should be collected by Dr. Sprat, was accompanied by a clause "beseeching him not to let any pass (if anything of that kind has escaped my pen) which may give the least offence in point of religion and good manners." His life was in keeping with his writings. Evelyn calls him that "incomparable poet, and virtuous man;" and Pepys heard Dr. Ward, the bishop of Winchester, and Dr. Bates, the well-known puritan, "mightily lamenting his death, as the best poet of our nation and as good a man." The king was pleased to add his testimony, worthless if it had stood alone, and declared "that Mr. Cowley had not left a better man behind him in England."

"In Windsor Forest," says Bowles, "there is description, incident, and history." A few remarks may still be made on it under each of these heads. Wordsworth assigned to it the distinction, in conjunction with Lady Winchelsea's Nocturnal Reverie, of containing the only "new images of external nature" to be found "in the poetry of the period intervening between Paradise Lost and the Seasons." He limited the praise to "a passage or two," and does not particularise the passages to which he alluded. He must chiefly have referred to the lines from ver. 111 to ver. 146; for the other happy "images of external nature" are borrowed. Pope had but a faint perception of latent and subtle beauties, and he usually kept to those general appearances which are obvious to all the world. His trees cast a shade, his streams murmur, his heath is purple, his harvests are yellow, and his skies blue. Living in the midst of English peasants he shows less familiarity with rural character than with rural scenes. Neither in his verse, nor his letters, is there anything to indicate that he had mixed, like Thomson, Cowper, and Wordsworth, with the cottagers around him, or had divined the noble qualities which are masked by a rustic exterior. His sympathies were contracted, and strange to say there is not one word in his voluminous writings on human kind which denotes that he had felt in the smallest degree the loveliness of children. His main interest was in men and women, whose names, for good or evil, were before the world, and in speaking of them he dwelt principally upon their foibles and misdeeds.

The censure of Warton is valid when he complains that Pope's account of field sports is deficient in characteristic details. He found a stag-chase in Cooper's Hill, which determined him to extend, while ho imitated, the plan of his original, and introduce hunting, fishing, shooting, and netting into Windsor Forest, though he was not a sportsman. The objection that his stag-chase is not as circumstantial as that of Somerville, is fairly answered by Johnson's remark, that the chase was the main subject of Somerville, and is only subsidiary with Pope. More, nevertheless, was required than a description of the impatience and galloping of the horses, and of the eagerness of the riders. Of this single topic one half was a translation from Statius. The fishing and shooting are superior to the hunt. The particulars are meagre, but there is mastery in the mode of representing them. The dying pheasant is painted in language as rich as its plumage, and the doves, the lapwing, the lark, and the wintry landscape, could not have been brought more vividly before the mind, or in fewer words. A gentle pathos intermingles with the whole. The portrait of the angler would have been perfect, in the single circumstance to which it is confined, if Pope had not said of him, "he hopes the scaly breed." Wakefield observed that "hope," used as an active verb, was intolerably affected, and he might have extended the remark to the use of "scaly breed" for fish.

The "story part" of Windsor Forest is a mosaic of translated scraps from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The fictions of heathen mythology, which had been repeated to satiety, which exhibited no invention, and had no charm for modern imaginations, are worse than an excrescence in the midst of English prospects, sports, and history. The bad effect does not stop with the puerilities themselves, but they communicate an air of weakness and unreality to the general texture of the work.

The well-merited praise which Bowles bestowed upon "the historical part" of the poem is inapplicable to the ill drawn character of William the Conqueror. Pope saw in him only a devastator and a tyrant. He had not caught a glimpse of the robust will, and masculine genius, which conquered and consolidated a great country. The vigour, daring, and sagacity which tempered the grosser traits in the mind of William are suppressed, and the masterly warrior and statesman is reduced to an inglorious spoiler of peasants, and hunter of deer. The advantages which accrued to England from the conquest itself were unknown to Pope, who fancied that its principal result was to destroy agriculture, and impoverish the people. He was not aware that it introduced a more advanced civilisation, imparted new energy to a backward stagnant population, opened up to them a vista of grander views, and repaid transitory suffering by vast and permanent benefits.

A fourth element in Windsor Forest is not noticed by Bowles. Pope considered that the "reflections upon life and political institutions" were the distinguishing excellence of Cooper's Hill. He emulated in this respect his master's merits, surpassed him in polish of style, and fell below him in strength of thought. Hunting the hare suggests to Pope this poor and false conclusion: