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A History of English Literature

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For the next dozen years he occupied himself chiefly with the formidable
task (suggested, no doubt, by Dryden's 'Virgil,' but expressive also of the
age) of translating 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey.' 'The Iliad' he completed
unaided, but then, tiring of the drudgery, he turned over half of 'The
Odyssey' to two minor writers. So easy, however, was his style to catch
that if the facts were not on record the work of his assistants would
generally be indistinguishable from his own. From an absolute point of view
many criticisms must be made of Pope's version. That he knew little Greek
when he began the work and from first to last depended much on translations
would in itself have made his rendering inaccurate. Moreover, the noble but
direct and simple spirit and language of Homer were as different as
possible from the spirit and language of the London drawing-rooms for which
Pope wrote; hence he not only expands, as every author of a
verse-translation must do in filling out his lines, but inserts new ideas
of his own and continually substitutes for Homer's expressions the
periphrastic and, as he held, elegant ones of the pseudo-classic diction.
The polished rimed couplet, also, pleasing as its precision and smoothness
are for a while, becomes eventually monotonous to most readers of a
romantic period. Equally serious is the inability which Pope shared with
most of the men of his time to understand the culture of the still
half-barbarous Homeric age. He supposes (in his Preface) that it was by a
deliberate literary artifice that Homer introduced the gods into his
action, supposes, that is, that Homer no more believed in the Greek gods
than did he, Pope, himself; and in general Pope largely obliterates the
differences between the Homeric warrior-chief and the eighteenth century
gentleman. The force of all this may be realized by comparing Pope's
translation with the very sympathetic and skilful one made (in prose) in
our own time by Messrs. Lang, Leaf, and Myers. A criticism of Pope's work
which Pope never forgave but which is final in some aspects was made by the
great Cambridge professor, Bentley: 'It's a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you
must not call it Homer.' Yet after all, Pope merited much higher praise
than this, and his work was really, a great achievement. It has been truly
said that every age must have the great classics translated into its own
dialect, and this work could scarcely have been better done for the early
eighteenth century than it is done by Pope.

The publication of Pope's Homer marks an important stage in the development
of authorship. Until the time of Dryden no writer had expected to earn his
whole living by publishing works of real literature. The medieval minstrels
and romancers of the higher class and the dramatists of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries had indeed supported themselves largely or wholly by
their works, but not by printing them. When, in Dryden's time, with the
great enlargement of the reading public, conditions were about to change,
the publisher took the upper hand; authors might sometimes receive gifts
from the noblemen to whom they inscribed dedications, but for their main
returns they must generally sell their works outright to the publisher and
accept his price. Pope's 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' afforded the first notably
successful instance of another method, that of publication by
subscription--individual purchasers at a generous price being secured
beforehand by solicitation and in acknowledgment having their names printed
in a conspicuous list in the front of the book. From the two Homeric poems
together, thanks to this device, Pope realized a profit of nearly £9000,
and thus proved that an author might be independent of the publisher. On
the success of 'The Iliad' alone Pope had retired to an estate at a London
suburb, Twickenham (then pronounced 'Twitnam'), where he spent the
remainder of his life. Here he laid out five acres with skill, though in
the formal landscape-garden taste of his time. In particular, he excavated
under the road a 'grotto,' which he adorned with mirrors and glittering
stones and which was considered by his friends, or at least by himself, as
a marvel of artistic beauty.

Only bare mention need here be made of Pope's edition of Shakspere,
prepared with his usual hard work but with inadequate knowledge and
appreciation, and published in 1725. His next production, 'The Dunciad,'
can be understood only in the light of his personal character. Somewhat
like Swift, Pope was loyal and kind to his friends and inoffensive to
persons against whom he did not conceive a prejudice. He was an unusually
faithful son, and, in a brutal age, a hater of physical brutality. But, as
we have said, his infirmities and hardships had sadly warped his
disposition and he himself spoke of 'that long disease, my life.' He was
proud, vain, abnormally sensitive, suspicious, quick to imagine an injury,
incredibly spiteful, implacable in resentment, apparently devoid of any
sense of honesty--at his worst hateful and petty-minded beyond any other
man in English literature. His trickiness was astonishing. Dr. Johnson
observes that he 'hardly drank tea without a stratagem,' and indeed he
seems to have been almost constitutionally unable to do anything in an open
and straightforward way. Wishing, for example, to publish his
correspondence, he not only falsified it, but to preserve an appearance of
modesty engaged in a remarkably complicated series of intrigues by which he
trapped a publisher into apparently stealing a part of it--and then loudly
protested at the theft and the publication. It is easy to understand,
therefore, that Pope was readily drawn into quarrels and was not an
agreeable antagonist. He had early taken a violent antipathy to the host of
poor scribblers who are known by the name of the residence of most of them,
Grub Street--an antipathy chiefly based, it would seem, on his contempt for
their worldly and intellectual poverty. For some years he had been carrying
on a pamphlet war against them, and now, it appears, he deliberately
stirred them up to make new attacks upon him. Determined, at any rate, to
overwhelm all his enemies at once in a great satire, he bent all his
energies, with the utmost seriousness, to writing 'The Dunciad' on the
model of Dryden's 'Mac Flecknoe' and irresponsibly 'dealt damnation 'round
the land.' Clever and powerful, the poem is still more disgusting--grossly
obscene, pitifully rancorous against scores of insignificant creatures, and
no less violent against some of the ablest men of the time, at whom Pope
happened to have taken offense. Yet throughout the rest of his life Pope
continued with keen delight to work the unsavory production over and to
bring out new editions.

During his last fifteen years Pope's original work was done chiefly in two
very closely related fields, first in a group of what he called 'Moral'
essays, second in the imitation of a few of the Satires and Epistles of
Horace, which Pope applied to circumstances of his own time. In the 'Moral'
Essays he had intended to deal comprehensively with human nature and
institutions, but such a systematic plan was beyond his powers. The longest
of the essays which he accomplished, the 'Essay on Man,' aims, like
'Paradise Lost,' to 'vindicate the ways of God to man,' but as regards
logic chiefly demonstrates the author's inability to reason. He derived the
ideas, in fragmentary fashion, from Bolingbroke, who was an amateur Deist
and optimist of the shallow eighteenth century type, and so far was Pope
from understanding what he was doing that he was greatly disturbed when it
was pointed out to him that the theology of the poem was Deistic rather
than Christian [Footnote: The name Deist was applied rather generally in
the eighteenth century to all persons who did not belong to some recognized
Christian denomination. More strictly, it belongs to those men who
attempted rationalistic criticism of the Bible and wished to go back to
what they supposed to be a primitive pure religion, anterior to revealed
religion and free from the corruptions and formalism of actual
Christianity. The Deistic ideas followed those expressed in the seventeenth
century by Lord Herbert of Cherbury, brother of George Herbert, who held
that the worship due to the Deity consists chiefly in reverence and
virtuous conduct, and also that man should repent of sin and forsake it and
that reward and punishment, both in this life and hereafter, follow from
the goodness and justice of God.] In this poem, as in all Pope's others of
this period, the best things are the detached observations. Some of the
other poems, especially the autobiographical 'Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,'
are notable for their masterly and venomous satirical sketches of various
contemporary characters.

Pope's physical disabilities brought him to premature old age, and he died
in 1744. His declining years were saddened by the loss of friends, and he
had never married, though his dependent and sensitive nature would have
made marriage especially helpful to him. During the greater part of his
life, however, he was faithfully watched over by a certain Martha Blount,
whose kindness he repaid with only less selfishness than that which
'Stella' endured from Swift. Indeed, Pope's whole attitude toward woman,
which appears clearly in his poetry, was largely that of the Restoration.
Yet after all that must be said against Pope, it is only fair to conclude,
as does his biographer, Sir Leslie Stephen: 'It was a gallant spirit which
got so much work out of this crazy carcase, and kept it going, spite of all
its feebleness, for fifty-six years.'

The question of Pope's rank among authors is of central importance for any
theory of poetry. In his own age he was definitely regarded by his
adherents as the greatest of all English poets of all time. As the
pseudo-classic spirit yielded to the romantic this judgment was modified,
until in the nineteenth century it was rather popular to deny that in any
true sense Pope was a poet at all. Of course the truth lies somewhere
between these extremes. Into the highest region of poetry, that of great
emotion and imagination, Pope scarcely enters at all; he is not a poet in
the same sense as Shakspere, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, or Browning;
neither his age nor his own nature permitted it. In lyric, original
narrative, and dramatic poetry he accomplished very little, though the
success of his 'Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady' and 'Eloisa to Abelard' must
be carefully weighed in this connection. On the other hand, it may well be
doubted if he can ever be excelled as a master in satire and kindred
semi-prosaic forms. He is supreme in epigrams, the terse statement of pithy
truths; his poems have furnished more brief familiar quotations to our
language than those of any other writer except Shakspere. For this sort of
effect his rimed couplet provided him an unrivalled instrument, and he
especially developed its power in antithesis, very frequently balancing one
line of the couplet, or one half of a line, against the other. He had
received the couplet from Dryden, but he polished it to a greater finish,
emphasizing, on the whole, its character as a single unit by making it more
consistently end-stopped. By this means he gained in snap and point, though
for purposes of continuous narrative or exposition he increased the
monotony and somewhat decreased the strength. Every reader must decide for
himself how far the rimed couplet, in either Dryden's or Pope's use of it,
is a proper medium for real poetry. But it is certain that within the
limits which he laid down for himself, there never was a more finished
artist than Pope. He chooses every word with the greatest care for its
value as both sound and sense; his minor technique is well-night perfect,
except sometimes in the matter of rimes; and in particular the variety
which he secures, partly by skilful shifting of pauses and use of extra
syllables, is remarkable; though it is a variety less forceful than
Dryden's.

[Note: The judgments of certain prominent critics on the poetry of Pope and
of his period may well be considered. Professor Lewis E. Gates has said:
'The special task of the pseudo-classical period was to order, to
systematize, and to name; its favorite methods were, analysis and
generalization. It asked for no new experience. The abstract, the typical,
the general--these were everywhere exalted at the expense of the image, the
specific experience, the vital fact.' Lowell declares that it 'ignored the
imagination altogether and sent Nature about her business as an impertinent
baggage whose household loom competed unlawfully with the machine-made
fabrics, so exquisitely uniform in pattern, of the royal manufactories.'
Still more hostile is Matthew Arnold: 'The difference between genuine
poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly
this: Their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry
is conceived and composed in the soul. The difference is immense.' Taine is
contemptuous: 'Pope did not write because he thought, but thought in order
to write. Inky paper, and the noise it makes in the world, was his idol.'
Professor Henry A. Beers is more judicious: 'Pope did in some inadequate
sense hold the mirror up to Nature.... It was a mirror in a drawing-room,
but it gave back a faithful image of society, powdered and rouged, to be
sure, and intent on trifles, yet still as human in its own way as the
heroes of Homer in theirs, though not broadly human.'

It should be helpful also to indicate briefly some of the more specific
mannerisms of pseudo-classical poetry, in addition to the general
tendencies named above on page 190. Almost all of them, it will be
observed, result from the habit of generalizing instead of searching for
the pictorial and the particular. 1. There is a constant preference (to
enlarge on what was briefly stated above) for abstract expressions instead
of concrete ones, such expressions as 'immortal powers' or 'Heaven' for
'God.' These abstract expressions are especially noticeable in the
descriptions of emotion, which the pseudo-classical writers often describe
without really feeling it, in such colorless words as 'joys, 'delights,'
and 'ecstasies,' and which they uniformly refer to the conventionalized
'heart, 'soul,' or 'bosom.' Likewise in the case of personal features,
instead of picturing a face with blue eyes, rosy lips, and pretty color,
these poets vaguely mention 'charms,' 'beauties,' 'glories,'
'enchantments,' and the like. These three lines from 'The Rape of the Lock'
are thoroughly characteristic:


The fair [the lady] each moment rises in her charms,
Repairs her smiles, awakens ev'ry grace,
And calls forth all the, wonders of her face.

The tendency reaches its extreme in the frequent use of abstract and often
absurdly pretentious expressions in place of the ordinary ones which to
these poets appeared too simple or vulgar. With them a field is generally a
'verdant mead'; a lock of hair becomes 'The long-contended honours of her
head'; and a boot 'The shining leather that encased the limb.'

2. There is a constant use of generic or generalizing articles, pronouns,
and adjectives, 'the,' 'a,' 'that,' 'every,' and 'each' as in some of the
preceding and in the following examples: 'The wise man's passion and the
vain man's boast.' 'Wind the shrill horn or spread the waving net.' 'To act
a Lover's or a Roman's part.' 'That bleeding bosom.' 3. There is an
excessive use of adjectives, often one to nearly every important noun,
which creates monotony. 4. The vocabulary is largely conventionalized,
with, certain favorite words usurping the place of a full and free variety,
such words as 'conscious,' 'generous, 'soft,' and 'amorous.' The metaphors
employed are largely conventionalized ones, like 'Now burns with glory, and
then melts with love.' 5. The poets imitate the Latin language to some
extent; especially they often prefer long words of Latin origin to short
Saxon ones, and Latin names to English--'Sol' for 'Sun, 'temple' for
'church,' 'Senate' for 'Parliament,' and so on.]

SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1709-1784. To the informal position of dictator of English
letters which had been held successively by Dryden, Addison, and Pope,
succeeded in the third quarter of the eighteenth century a man very
different from any of them, one of the most forcefully individual of all
authors, Samuel Johnson. It was his fortune to uphold, largely by the
strength of his personality, the pseudo-classical ideals which Dryden and
Addison had helped to form and whose complete dominance had contributed to
Pope's success, in the period when their authority was being undermined by
the progress of the rising Romantic Movement.

Johnson was born in 1709, the son of a bookseller in Lichfield. He
inherited a constitution of iron, great physical strength, and fearless
self-assertiveness, but also hypochondria (persistent melancholy),
uncouthness of body and movement, and scrofula, which disfigured his face
and greatly injured his eyesight. In his early life as well as later,
spasmodic fits of abnormal mental activity when he 'gorged' books,
especially the classics, as he did food, alternated with other fits of
indolence. The total result, however, was a very thorough knowledge of an
extremely wide range of literature; when he entered Oxford in 1728 the
Master of his college assured him that he was the best qualified applicant
whom he had ever known. Johnson, on his side, was not nearly so well
pleased with the University; he found the teachers incompetent, and his
pride suffered intensely from his poverty, so that he remained at Oxford
little more than a year. The death of his father in 1731 plunged him into a
distressingly painful struggle for existence which lasted for thirty years.
After failing as a subordinate teacher in a boarding-school he became a
hack-writer in Birmingham, where, at the age of twenty-five, he made a
marriage with a widow, Mrs. Porter, an unattractive, rather absurd, but
good-hearted woman of forty-six. He set up a school of his own, where he
had only three pupils, and then in 1737 tramped with one of them, David
Garrick, later the famous actor, to London to try his fortune in another
field. When the two reached the city their combined funds amounted to
sixpence. Sir Robert Walpole, ruling the country with unscrupulous
absolutism, had now put an end to the employment of literary men in public
life, and though Johnson's poem 'London,' a satire on the city written in
imitation of the Roman poet Juvenal and published in 1738, attracted much
attention, he could do no better for a time than to become one of that
undistinguished herd of hand-to-mouth and nearly starving Grub Street
writers whom Pope was so contemptuously abusing and who chiefly depended on
the despotic patronage of magazine publishers. Living in a garret or even
walking the streets at night for lack of a lodging, Johnson was sometimes
unable to appear at a tavern because he had no respectable clothes. It was
ten years after the appearance of 'London' that he began to emerge, through
the publication of his 'Vanity of Human Wishes,' a poem of the same kind as
'London' but more sincere and very powerful. A little later Garrick, who
had risen very much more rapidly and was now manager of Drury Lane theater,
gave him substantial help by producing his early play 'Irene,' a
representative pseudo-classical tragedy of which it has been said that a
person with a highly developed sense of duty may be able to read it
through.

Meanwhile, by an arrangement with leading booksellers, Johnson had entered
on the largest, and, as it proved, the decisive, work of his life, the
preparation of his 'Dictionary of the English Language.' The earliest
mentionable English dictionary had appeared as far back as 1604,
'containing 3000 hard words ... gathered for the benefit and help of
ladies, gentle women, or any other unskilful persons.' Others had followed;
but none of them was comprehensive or satisfactory. Johnson, planning a far
more thorough work, contracted to do it for £1575--scanty pay for himself
and his copyists, the more so that the task occupied more than twice as
much time as he had expected, over seven years. The result, then, of very
great labor, the 'Dictionary' appeared in 1755. It had distinct
limitations. The knowledge of Johnson's day was not adequate for tracing
the history and etymology of words, and Johnson himself on being asked the
reason for one of his numerous blunders could only reply, with his
characteristic blunt frankness, 'sheer ignorance.' Moreover, he allowed his
strong prejudices to intrude, even though he colored them with humor; for
example in defining 'oats' as 'a grain which in England is generally given
to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.' Jesting at himself he
defined 'lexicographer' as 'a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.'
Nevertheless the work, though not creative literature, was a great and
necessary one, and Johnson did it, on the whole, decidedly well. The
'Dictionary,' in successive enlargements, ultimately, though not until
after Johnson's death, became the standard, and it gave him at once the
definite headship of English literary life. Of course, it should be added,
the English language has vastly expanded since his time, and Johnson's
first edition contained only a tithe of the 400,000 words recorded in the
latest edition of Webster (1910).

With the 'Dictionary' is connected one of the best-known incidents in
English literary history. At the outset of the undertaking Johnson exerted
himself to secure the patronage and financial aid of Lord Chesterfield, an
elegant leader of fashion and of fashionable literature. At the time
Chesterfield, not foreseeing the importance of the work, was coldly
indifferent, but shortly before the Dictionary appeared, being better
informed, he attempted to gain a share in the credit by commending it in a
periodical. Johnson responded with a letter which is a perfect masterpiece
of bitter but polished irony and which should be familiar to every student.

The hard labor of the 'Dictionary' had been the only remedy for Johnson's
profound grief at the death of his wife, in 1752; and how intensively he
could apply himself at need he showed again some years later when to pay
his mother's funeral expenses he wrote in the evenings of a single week his
'Rasselas,' which in the guise of an Eastern tale is a series of
philosophical discussions of life.

Great as were Johnson's labors during the eight years of preparation of the
'Dictionary' they made only a part of his activity. For about two years he
earned a living income by carrying on the semi-weekly 'Rambler,' one of the
numerous imitations of 'The Spectator.' He was not so well qualified as
Addison or Steele for this work, but he repeated it some years later in
'The Idler.'

It was not until 1775 that Johnson received from Oxford the degree of LL.D.
which gave him the title of 'Dr.,' now almost inseparable from his name;
but his long battle with poverty had ended on the accession of George III
in 1762, when the ministers, deciding to signalize the new reign by
encouraging men of letters, granted Johnson a pension of £300 for life. In
his Dictionary Johnson had contemptuously defined a pension thus: 'An
allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England, it is
generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to
his country.' This was embarrassing, but Johnson's friends rightly
persuaded him to accept the pension, which he, at least, had certainly
earned by services to society very far from treasonable. However, with the
removal of financial pressure his natural indolence, increased by the
strain of hardships and long-continued over-exertion, asserted itself in
spite of his self-reproaches and frequent vows of amendment. Henceforth he
wrote comparatively little but gave expression to his ideas in
conversation, where his genius always showed most brilliantly. At the
tavern meetings of 'The Club' (commonly referred to as 'The Literary
Club'), of which Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Goldsmith, Gibbon, and others,
were members, he reigned unquestioned conversational monarch. Here or in
other taverns with fewer friends he spent most of his nights, talking and
drinking incredible quantities of tea, and going home in the small hours to
lie abed until noon.

But occasionally even yet he aroused himself to effort. In 1765 appeared
his long-promised edition of Shakspere. It displays in places much of the
sound sense which is one of Johnson's most distinguishing merits, as in the
terse exposure of the fallacies of the pseudo-classic theory of the three
dramatic unities, and it made some interpretative contributions; but as a
whole it was carelessly and slightly done. Johnson's last important
production, his most important really literary work, was a series of 'Lives
of the English Poets' from the middle of the seventeenth century, which he
wrote for a publishers' collection of their works. The selection of poets
was badly made by the publishers, so that many of the lives deal with very
minor versifiers. Further, Johnson's indolence and prejudices are here
again evident; often when he did not know the facts he did not take the
trouble to investigate; a thorough Tory himself he was often unfair to men
of Whig principles; and for poetry of the delicately imaginative and
romantic sort his rather painfully practical mind had little appreciation.
Nevertheless he was in many respects well fitted for the work, and some of
the lives, such as those of Dryden, Pope, Addison and Swift, men in whom he
took a real interest, are of high merit.

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